Perhaps people who experience the world in ways that are considered atypical have an intuitive feeling for the limits of typicality.

Our species and our culture are so driven by sight that even people who are blind from birth will describe the world using visual words and metaphors.

I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat,” Nagel wrote. “Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.

How many senses are there? Around 2,370 years ago, Aristotle wrote that there are five, in both humans and other animals—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. This tally persists today. But according to the philosopher Fiona Macpherson, there are reasons to doubt it.

The senses constrain an animal‘s life, restricting what it can detect and do. But they also define a species‘ future, and the evolutionary possibilities ahead of it.

Light is just electromagnetic radiation.Sound is just waves of pressure.Smells are just small molecules.It‘s not obvious that we should be able to detect any of those things,let alone convert them into electrical signals or derive from those signals the spectacle of a sunrise,or the sound of a voice,or the scent of baking bread.The senses transform the coursing chaos of the world into perceptions and experiences things we can react to and act upon

They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

They move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

There are animals with eyes on their genitals, ears on their knees, noses on their limbs, and tongues all over their skin.

There are animals that can hear sounds in what seems to us like perfect silence, see colors in what looks to us like total darkness, and sense vibrations in what feels to us like complete stillness

It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.

Trees of green, red roses too, skies of blue, and clouds of white—these are not part of its wonderful world. The tick doesn‘t willfully ignore them. It simply cannot sense them and doesn‘t know they exist.

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality‘s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world

Only you have the power to change your life.

I don‘t need to find anyone. Right now, in this moment, I‘m my own hero.

I‘m never going to be offended if you ask the question. I only get offended if someone who isn‘t my race just assumes they know the answer.”

Every day you get to choose the way your world looks. Regardless of how you were raised or what you were taught to believe, you get to decide where your story goes from here.

Different isn‘t unique to them; different is their normal.

“When you know better, you do better.”

At some point you grow up enough to understand that many people here on earth are different from you; and what you do with that knowledge defines much of your story.

I didn‘t know that being other was wrong, because I didn‘t know that other existed.

Strength is never easy to come by.

“I am strong. I am smart. I am courageous.”

Just as you‘ve chosen to stay in this place for so long, you can also choose to get yourself out of it.

Divorce is destruction that starts at the top and breaks everything apart on the way down.

The longer you live in a state of honesty, the easier it becomes to simply exist there all the time.

I blindly stumbled my way down a path I could not see. I chose to move forward because, while I knew I would find pain, I also knew I would draw strength.

“Yes, it‘s hard! But our dream didn‘t go away because it got hard,

it's possible to find purpose—even in the absence of explanation.

You cannot ignore your pain. You cannot ever leave it behind completely. The only thing you can do is find a way to embrace the good that came out of it—even if it takes you years to discover what that is.

I am still here because I refuse to let anything or anyone decide what I get to have. I am still here because I refuse to let my trauma have the last word. I am still here because I will not let a nightmare have more power than my dreams. I am still here because I didn‘t allow the hard time to make me weak; I willed it to make me strong.

“Someone else‘s opinion of you is none of your business.”

My goals are real to me. There isn‘t a single doubt or question in my mind that I can achieve them.

Every single aspect of our persona, no matter how long we‘ve rocked it, is a choice we make every day.

Do you stop yourself from daring to try something new because you‘re already positive you‘ll fail? Do you remain silent when you have so much to say? Do you believe you‘ll never do better or be better than you are right now because of your family of origin? Do you hesitate to admit your dreams aloud because you‘re nervous about others making fun of you or judging you for your choices?

I have so many goals and dreams for myself, and not one of them is small. They‘re big and wild and full of hope. They require faith and courage and a whole lot of audacity.

you can‘t blame the past for the things that went wrong if you aren‘t also willing to be thankful for the things that went right.

The things you think are so difficult could be someone else‘s dream come true.

Remember that someone else is praying to have the kind of chaos you‘re currently crying about.

Tomorrow is another day and a chance to try again.

You are in control of yourself. But you cannot control the actions of others,

Life is crazy and stressful, and sometimes it gets worse before it gets better.

I pretend it isn‘t there. I keep my head down and keep working harder and harder because nobody can hit a moving target.

small things can have monstrous effects.

it's highly possible that by not being where you thought you should be, you will end up exactly where you‘re meant to go.

The most beautiful things in my life were never on my to-do list.

But I‘ve learned that along with my list of goals, I have to give myself some grace.

Your life will unfold as it was meant to, even when it unfolds into something painful and difficult to navigate.

Do you have faith in my plan or not?

Nothing is wasted.Every single moment is preparing you for the next.