When you acknowledge that there is nothing repulsive or unforgivable or shameful about yourself, it becomes easier to be that authentic person and feel like you're living a less performed life.
Interpretation
Accepting yourself leads to a more authentic and genuine life.
This quote by John Green emphasizes the importance of self-acceptance in achieving authenticity. When individuals let go of feelings of shame or repulsion towards themselves, they free themselves from the constraints of performance and societal expectations, allowing for a more genuine and fulfilling life experience.
In practice
During a motivational speech to encourage self-acceptance.
Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?" "Sometimes people don't always understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said. Isaac shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?" I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.
Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.
I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.
I don't think pandemics make us afraid of death, I think they make us afraid of oblivion. They force us to grapple with the futility of effort. Also they make us barf which isn't fun either... Wash your hands, cover your coughs, and find a way to hold in balance the futility of effort with the necessity to struggle.
So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that's not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered. I have found this very useful to think about over the years, and I find that it is a lot easier and more bearable to be sad when you aren't constantly berating yourself for being sad.
We kiss. Her hands are freezing on my face, and she tastes like coffee and the smell of the onion is still stuck in my nose, and my lips are all dry from the endless winter. And it's awesome.
However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.
I wanted to lie hour after hour on a couch, pouring out the dark, secret places of my heart--do this feeling that over my shoulder sat humanity and wisdom and generosity, a munificent heart--do this until that incredibly lovely day when the great man would say to me, his voice grave and dramatic with discovery: "This is you, Exley. Rise and go back into the world a whole man.
While everyone else is thinking about economics and politics, executive salaries and the future of the euro, do the opposite, even if it's hard. Invest in the spirit.
Usage is like oxygen for ideas. That means every moment you're working on something without it being in the public it's actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.
Accept what comes to you totally & completely so that you can appreciate it, learn from it & then let it go.
If all our agents would abridge their speeches one half, I am satisfied the effect produced would be much greater. The 'art of leaving off' at the right time, and in the right place, is one of the most difficult things to learn.
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