The mind knows the truth when your heart denies what it feels. When you don't feel safe to let people in it is because you're not ready to deal with the pain of honesty.

Every broken heart has screamed at one time or another: Why can't you see who I truly am?

When you experience loss, people say you’ll move through the 5 stages of grief….Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance….. What they don’t tell you is that you’ll cycle through them all every day.

The fact is that when you admit that you can’t blame anyone or anything else, you begin to blame yourself. The human mind gives up trying to find an executioner, but still it must blame someone. Anger that is not expressed tends to turn inward and, instead, attacks the very one who feels it. You move from anger and guilt into depression.

You will never accept gratitude as a solution to your problems, until you have reached the last stage of grief--acceptance.

In Louisiana, one of the first stages of grief is eating your weight in Popeyes fried chicken. The second stage is doing the same with boudin. People have been known to swap the order. Or to do both at the same time.

It is a strange thing that the human species can only go three days without water and three weeks without food, before the body dies. Yet, so many people can go years hanging onto pain and feeling emotionally dead inside. I suppose if it was the other way around more people would go to school to be morticians because of the booming business, or pastors would have to hand out Valium with the sacrament, just to keep the census high.