''Sometimes being brave is being quiet. Being brave is getting off the drug of performance. For me, being brave is trusting that what my God is asking of me,what my family and community is asking from me, is totally different than what our culture says I should do.Sometimes, brave looks boring, and that’s totally, absolutely, okay.''

''It’s easier to be impressive to strangers than it is to be consistently kind behind the scenes. It’s easier to show up and be a hit for an hour than it is to get down on the floor with your kids when you’re so tired your eyes are screaming and bone-dry. It’s easier to be charming on a conference call than it is to traverse the distance between you and your spouse, the distance you created.''

''It is better to be loved than admired. It is better to be truly known and seen and taken care of by a small tribe than adored by strangers who think they know you in a meaningful way. We know that’s true. But many of us, functionally, have gotten that math wrong in one season or another.''

''It’s when I’m alone and quiet that I feel my strength. I need more and more of it than I ever have, like a vitamin, like a safe house.'' '' when things are hard and painful and barbed at home, what a lovely thing it is to be loved at your work, right? What a lovely and dangerous thing.What an easy escape, into people who think you’re great and work that makes you feel valuable. I can master my laptop in a way that I cannot master parenting. I can control my publishing schedule and my deadlines in a way that I cannot control our marriage.''

''In seasons of deep transformation, silence will be your greatest guide. Even if it’s scary, especially if it’s scary, let silence be your anchor, your sacred space,your dwelling place. It’s where you will become used to your own voice, your agency, your authority. It’s where you will nurture that fledgling sense of authority, like a newborn deer on spindly fragile legs. Silence will become the incubator for your newfound spirit, keeping it safe, growing it steadily.''

''What’s changing everything for me is a new understanding that we get to decide how we want to live. We get to shape our days and our weeks, and if we don’t, they’ll get shaped by the wide catch-all of “normal” and “typical,” and who wants that?''

''But as I learn to dwell in the silence of my own heart, I’m finding myself drawn to the silence of nature—of water, land, expanse. As I learn to trust the stillness I’ve been running from for so long, I’m finding that I crave more and more silence. I’m drawn back to the water, to the sound of the waves instead of the sounds of traffic and the blare of action and excitement.''

''What makes sense to me: pushing. Lists. Responsibility. Action, action, action. What’s changing my life: silence. Rest. Letting myself be fragile. Asking for help.''

''We disappoint people because we’re limited. We have to accept the idea of our own limitations in order to accept the idea that we’ll disappoint people. I have this much time. I have this much energy. I have this much relational capacity.And it does get easier. The first few times I had to say no were excruciating.But as you regularly tell the truth about what you can and can’t do, who you are and who you’re not, you’ll be surprised at how some people will cheer you on.And, frankly, how much less you’ll care when other people don’t.''

''Some people are very uncomfortable with the idea of disappointing anyone. They think that if you are kind, you’ll never disappoint anyone. They think that if you try hard enough, if you manage your time well enough, if you’re selfless enough, prayerful enough, godly enough, you’ll never disappoint anyone. I fear these people are headed for a rude awakening.''

''My mentor’s words rang in my ears: Stop. Right now. Remake your life from the inside out. I don’t know a way to remake anything without first taking down the existing structures, and that’s what no does—it puts the brakes on your screaming-fast life and gives you a chance to stop and inspect just exactly what you’ve created for yourself, as difficult as that might be.''

''The word that changed everything, of course, is no. I’d been saying yes and yes and yes, indiscriminately, haphazardly, resentfully for years. And I realized all at once that I’d spent all my yeses, and in order to find peace and health in my life,I needed to learn to say no.''

''And many of us continue to pretend we don’t have a choice—the success just happened, and we’re along for the ride. The opportunities kept coming, and anyone in our position would have jumped to meet them.But we’re the ones who keep putting up the chairs. If I work in such a way that I don’t have enough energy to give to my marriage, I need to take down some chairs. If I say yes to so many work things that my kids only get to see tired mommy, I need to take down some chairs.''

''There we were, women in our thirties. Educated, married, mothers, women who have careers, who manage homes and oversee companies. And there we were, utterly resigned to lives that feel overly busy and pressurized,disconnected and exhausted.But that’s shifting the blame, right? Who’s the boss, if not us? Who’s forcing us to live this way? Or, possibly, do we not want to face the answer to that question, preferring to believe we can’t possibly be held responsible for what we’ve done?''

''I believed that work would save me, make me happy, solve my problems;that if I absolutely wore myself out, happiness would be waiting for me on the other side of all that work. But it wasn’t. On the other side was just more work. More expectations, more responsibility.''

''Productivity became my idol, the thing I loved and valued above all else. We all have these complicated tangles of belief and identity and narrative, and one of the early stories I told about myself is that my ability to get-it-done is what kept me around. I wasn’t beautiful. I didn’t have a special or delicate skill. But I could get stuff done, and it seemed to me that ability was my entrance into the rooms into which I wanted to be invited.I couldn’t imagine a world of unconditional love or grace, where people simply enter into rooms because the door is open to everyone.''

''As I unravel the many things that brought me to this crisis point, one is undeniably my own belief that hard work can solve anything, that pushing through is always the right thing, that rest and slowness are for weak people, not for high-capacity people like me.''

''I’ve been working all my life. Work has been a through line,one that I’m very thankful for, one that has taught me so much about the benefits of structure, discipline, skill, communication, and responsibility.But at some point, good clean work became something else: an impossible standard to meet, a frantic way of living, a practice of ignoring my body and my spirit in order to prove myself as the hardest of hard workers.''

''You can make a drug—a way to anesthetize yourself—out of anything:working out, binge-watching TV, working, having sex, shopping, volunteering,cleaning, dieting. Any of those things can keep you from feeling pain for a while —that’s what drugs do. And, used like a drug, over time, shopping or TV or work or whatever will make you less and less able to connect to the things that matter, like your own heart and the people you love. That’s another thing drugs do: they isolate you.''

''I knew that I needed to work less. That’s absolutely true. That’s the first step.But it’s trickier than that: the internal voice that tells me to hustle can find a to-do list in my living room as easily as it can in an office. It’s not about paid employment. It’s about trusting that the hustle will never make you feel the way you want to feel. In that way, it’s a drug, and I fall for the initial rush every time:if I push enough, I will feel whole. I will feel proud, I will feel happy. What I feel, though, is exhausted and resentful, but with well-organized closets.''

''Part of being an adult is taking responsibility for resting your body and your soul. And part of being an adult is learning to meet your own needs, because when it comes down to it, with a few exceptions, no one else is going to do it for you.''

I don’t operate in later. I’ve always been proud of that. But look where it’s gotten me. Stuffed. Exhausted. Wrung out and over-scheduled to the point where even things I love to do sound like obligations, and all my deepest desires and fantasies involve sleep and being left alone. My greatest dream is to be left alone? Things have gone terribly awry.''

''No more pushing and rushing. No more cold pizza at midnight, no more flights, no more books, no more houseguests, no more of all these things, even things I love, things I long for, things that make me happy. No more. Only less.Less of everything. Less stress. Less crying. Less noise. Less TV. Less wine.Less online shopping. Less one more thing one more thing one more thing, whether that one more thing is a trip or a movie or a boat ride or a playdate. Less cramming 36—or 56 or 106—hours into a day that has only ever held 24.''

''It astounds me to realize that the groundedness is within me, and that maybe it was there all along.''