Cover artwork by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh, from an unpublished reusable sketchbook in progress. Other work from my sketchbook practice.
A thematic selection of translated notebook fragments.
Nothing is as exhausting as trying to be someone other than yourself. Realising that you won't manage to become some imaginary ideal is painful at first, but it gives you a lot of freedom afterwards.
If encountering the inevitability of death gives us a sense of life's value, encountering the impossibility of overcoming aloneness gives us the joy of uniqueness and individuality.
Therapy is an opportunity to get to know yourself with another person's help.
Wanting high marks for everything means carrying a panel of judges and their scorecards inside you.
The identity was so diffuse that it consisted of a single hole.
The more blurred your identity, the more things you recognise yourself in.
The key word in self-care isn't yes. It's no.
Letting another person's feelings pass through you and remaining untouched vs. letting another person's feelings pass through you and being touched by their strength and beauty.
Giving yourself time to be yourself — an answer to the question: ‘Why is this therapy of yours taking longer than a Moscow–Vladivostok freight train?’
When you know how to make life good for yourself, it's strange to get involved with people who make it worse.
It's hard to keep giving yourself shit inside and feel good at the same time.
Facing yourself can be difficult. But endlessly running away from yourself is much harder.
Psychological partisans: people who try to pass off someone who isn't them as themselves, even to their therapist. Never mind the therapist — even to themselves.
It's exhausting to lie to others, showing one thing while feeling another. But some people seem to have no idea what to do with themselves unless they're playing Stierlitz. Anything to avoid meeting themselves.
The basis of abuse is denying another person's identity. As in: — I know better who you are.
— I feel like a hostage to the situation. — We're all hostages to life.
To become someone, to acquire a stable identity, you'll have to give up the idea of being anyone at all.
Low self-esteem is often a weak sense of yourself in the absence of an external assessment.
The more shit a person does, the worse they'll eventually feel. But the people doing shit keep hoping to break the system.
What matters isn't so much whether self-esteem is high or low, but how realistic it is.
Psychology Notebook is a translated personal archive of observations, study and lecture notes, paraphrases, quotations and remembered ideas. A fragment's presence here does not establish exclusive authorship or scientific consensus. These are notebook fragments, not clinical guidance.