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“I wake up scared and I'm scared all day. I'm scared of being scared. Scared of "losing it". Scared of not being able to function. Scared of being hospitalized. Scared that I am not okay. Scared of what life is and if I am wasting mine. Scared that I have no home - that even the place I call home has no bottom to it and I will just keep falling under and under and under.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“There aren’t many ways to find comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I fear others will discover that I am not only imperfect; I’m not even okay. I fear that I truly am not okay. But most people who meet me never know that I am struggling. On the outside I am smiling. I am juggling all the balls of okayness: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, existential. Underneath, I am suffocating.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“My mother had never known me either, though it wasn't because I hadn't given her a chance. I'd given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn't seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn't even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“But what if I did tell people exactly what was going on? What if I valued my own peace of mind more than what other people think of me? Would I end up jobless, friendless, and loveless? Would I vanish entirely?”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“It seems weird to me that here we are, alive, not knowing why we are alive, and just going about our business, sort of ignoring that fact. How are we all not looking at each other all the time just like, Yo, what the fuck?”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Maybe [the ocean and I] were on the same side, comprised of the same things, water mostly, also mystery. The ocean swallowed things up--boats, people--but it didn't look outside itself for fulfillment. It could take whatever skimmed its surface or it could leave it. In its depths already lived a whole world of who-knows-what. It was self-sustaining. I should be like that. It made me wonder what was inside of me.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I know I have an ocean of sadness inside me and I have been damming it my entire life. I have always imagined that something was supposed to rescue me from the ocean. But maybe the ocean is its own ultimate rescue â€� a reprieve from the linear mind and into the world of feeling. Shouldn’t someone have told me this at birth? Shouldn’t someone have said, “Enjoy your ocean of sadness, there is nothing to fear in it,â€� so I didn’t have to build all those dams? I think some of us are less equipped to deal with our oceans, or maybe we are just more terrified, because we see and feel a little extra. So we build our shitty dams. But inevitably, the dam always breaks again. It breaks again and the ocean speaks to me. It says ‘I’m alive and it’s realâ€�. It says, 'I’m going to die, and it’s real.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I, myself, had a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I wanted only to fill it, frightened that if I didn’t it would eat me alive or kill me. But sometimes I longed for total annihilation in it—a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Oh, my daughter,â€� I said. “You will forget that I am here. This is the way of human beings, to forget. But you found your way back to me once and so can find your way back again, because I am always here. The world will hurt you again and again. You will hurt yourself again and again. And when it does, and when you do, you will remember me again and again. You will drop to your knees. You will hold yourself. You will be your own daughter again.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“I would say I'm less afraid of dying than I am of life.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I am a superficial woman of depth.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Just saw two ants drown together in my bathtub and it reminded me of us: a love story.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I'm always scared that every feeling is going to be permanent.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I'm in love with you and you don't want anything to do with me so I think we can make this work: a love story.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I am giving you permission to tell the truth about where you are in your process of dismantling your fucked-up schemas. I am not pressuring you to dismantle anything. I am saying let’s be here together, undismantled, and just accept that this is where we are. Let’s love each other right where we are, even as we compare ourselves to one another. I am saying, yes, baby, I know it’s hard.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“What happens to the space that two people occupied together? How can it just disappear? Why can't it just become something else?”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Bringing a child into the world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. It’s tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. It’s a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but you’re the only raver. There’s no weird New Age guide. There’s no shitty techno. There’s only you and the infinite.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I feel bad about my struggle, because it is nothing compared to other people’s struggles and yet it still hurts.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“In some ways, my moods did and did not exist. People said that you could will a mood into being or will it away. Just think positively. But I never felt that way. My moods were their own entities, even if no one could understand why they were there. That was what made me scared of feelings. I realized now what I had to do, in spite of what others said, was not try to change a mood but surrender to it. I had to surrender to whatever feelings arrived and in doing so I could maybe ride them, floating on the waves. I decided I was going to surrender.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Let's pretend you are capable of being who I think I need you to be: a love story.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I don’t know that we are ever really okay in life, but there are times when we feel closer to it -- when we don’t remember what it feels like to suffer.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“In this moment I resolve to kiss my husband with an open mouth forever. I want to freeze him the way I see him in this instant: dark eyebrows, sexy, sleepy hair and sleepy eyes. But we can't freeze the way that we see the people we love, as much as we would wish. I know that I will kiss my husband with a closed mouth again, at some point. I know that I will even kiss him with a closed heart.

I pray for our love. I pray that even if I kiss my husband with a closed heart, my heart opens again to him. When I desire my husband. I am grateful to desire my husband. What can we hope for in a marriage but to keep seeing things anew? With the people we love, it is so easy to stop seeing them at all.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even just for a moment. Maybe once that person became too real, too familiar, they could no longer get you high - no longer be a drug - and that was why you grew tired of them.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I made myself wrong for needing someone, for revealing that need. I needed more than the universe could give me. Clearly my feelings were too big for the universe to hold, too disgusting. I would not put them out there like that again. I didn't even want to have to feel them myself.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“For someone with anxiety, dramatic situations are, in a way, more comfortable than the mundane. In dramatic situations the world rises to meet you anxiety.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“How dare he not give a fuck? What a luxury, the luxury of a man. The luxury of someone who looked at the ravages of time and went, “Eh.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Was it ever real? The way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I think it’s time for you to drop back into my life, ruin it, then disappear again: a love story. The”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“When I'm sleeping, the committee stays up all night and then greets me at dawn with really bad ideas. It's like, "Good morning! Everything is shit! Time to act impulsively. But first let's start by getting into imaginary fights with people from the past. Next let's catalog everything that's wrong with you and your life. Also, I want to remind you of everything you don't have—and everything you should be scared of losing. Let's begin!”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays