A Literary Prescription for

Choosing Yourself

For the brave, overdue moment you decide your own life is worth choosing.

For a lot of us, choosing ourselves is the last thing we learned to do. We put everyone else first, kept the peace, made ourselves small and easy, and called it kindness. And then one day the cost of it becomes too high to ignore. Choosing yourself is not about turning cold or selfish. It is about finally counting yourself in: honouring your own needs, your own path, your own one life. These books and poems are for that quiet, courageous turning point.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Some of these are wise, warm guides to reclaiming yourself, and some are novels of women who quietly, stubbornly choose their own lives. Non-fiction and fiction together, they carry the same permission: that honouring yourself is not a betrayal of anyone, and that your life is allowed to be your own.

Women Who Run with the Wolves

Clarissa Pinkola Estés · 1992

Estés, a Jungian analyst and storyteller, uses myth and fairy tale to help women recover the wild, instinctive, true parts of themselves that a tidy life so often buries. It is deep, unhurried and quietly powerful, less a self-help book than an initiation. For anyone who senses they have handed too much of themselves away, it is a map back.

The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck

Sarah Knight · 2015

A sharp, funny antidote to a life spent worrying what everyone else thinks. Knight’s premise is simple: you have a limited budget of time, energy and care, and spending it on other people’s expectations leaves nothing for your own life. Irreverent and genuinely freeing, it is permission to stop performing and start choosing.

“You have a limited supply… spend it wisely.”

The Mountain Is You

Brianna Wiest · 2020

Wiest writes about self-sabotage: the quiet ways we get in our own way, and how to stop. Choosing yourself, she argues, often means facing the mountain of your own fear and habit rather than anyone else. Thoughtful and quotable, it is a gentle, clarifying read for anyone ready to stop being their own obstacle.

White Oleander

Janet Fitch · 1999

Passed from foster home to foster home in the shadow of a brilliant, destructive mother, young Astrid has to work out, painfully, who she is when no one is choosing her. Fitch’s prose is gorgeous and unflinching, and the novel becomes a fierce story of forging your own self out of very little. Unforgettable, and quietly triumphant.

The Bean Trees

Barbara Kingsolver · 1988

A young woman leaves the only life expected of her, drives west, and builds a family and a self entirely on her own terms. Kingsolver’s warm, funny, big-hearted debut is all about choosing your own path and the unexpected people who become home along the way. A joy, and quietly encouraging for anyone starting over as themselves.

Chocolat

Joanne Harris · 1999

Vianne blows into a buttoned-up French village and quietly refuses to live by its rules, opening a chocolate shop in the teeth of the town’s disapproval and staying gloriously, generously herself. It is a warm, sensuous novel about the courage to live your own way. For anyone under pressure to shrink and conform, Vianne is a delicious act of defiance.

Poems about choosing yourself

For belonging to yourself

“I Am Not Yours”

Sara Teasdale, 1915

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

Teasdale writes about love without self-erasure: she can long for someone and still refuse to disappear into them. Her clear, modern voice draws the exact line that choosing yourself requires, that you can give your heart without giving away your whole self. A lovely poem for anyone learning that loving others need not mean losing you.

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from “The Winds of Fate”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1900

One ship sails East, and another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
’Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.

Wilcox’s much-loved lines make the case for taking the helm of your own life: the winds of circumstance blow the same for everyone, but it is the set of your own sails, the choices you make, that decides your direction. A brisk, encouraging reminder that choosing yourself starts with owning the wheel.

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from “O Me! O Life!”

Walt Whitman, 1892

…That you are here — that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

After a long list of doubts and disappointments, Whitman arrives at his ringing answer: that you are here, that you have an identity, and that the great play of life is still going and still waiting for your verse. It is a poem about your own worth and your own part, no small thing when you are learning to count yourself in.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about choosing yourself to keep

The most powerful relationship you will ever have is the relationship with yourself.

Diane von Furstenberg

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You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

Buddha

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Self-care is not selfish. You cannot serve from an empty vessel.

Eleanor Brownn

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Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing we will ever do.

Brené Brown

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There is nothing selfish about finally counting yourself in. You were always meant to be on the list.

Georgia Clare

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From Georgia

Coming home to yourself

A gentle practice for meeting yourself with acceptance rather than judgement, and an essay on stopping the exhausting search for other people’s approval.

A Meditation for Self-Acceptance

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A warm, guided practice for softening the inner critic and meeting yourself, exactly as you are, with a little more kindness.

Listen Now For Free

Stop Seeking Validation from Other People

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On the quiet freedom that comes when you stop outsourcing your worth, and start trusting your own sense of who you are and what you need.

Read the Essay →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice, one day at a time.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Choosing Yourself

Where should I start?

Start with Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a deep, mythic book about reclaiming the parts of yourself you were taught to hide or hand over. And if you want something sharper and funnier, Sarah Knight’s The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck is a bracing little permission slip to stop living for everyone else’s approval. The poems below are worth keeping close too.

What can I read about putting myself first without guilt?

Books that reframe it as health rather than selfishness. The Mountain Is You is about getting out of your own way, and the novels here, from Chocolat to The Bean Trees, are full of women who quietly choose their own lives against the pressure to do otherwise. Or begin with the poems and the lines to keep further down the page. Choosing yourself is not selfish; it is often the bravest, most honest thing you can do.

Which quotes about choosing yourself are worth keeping?

Quotes worth keeping include “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” (Oscar Wilde), “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” (attributed to the Buddha) and “Self-care is not selfish. You cannot serve from an empty vessel.” (Eleanor Brownn). You will find these and more in the quotes section above.

Can reading really help me choose myself?

It genuinely can. When you have spent years putting yourself last, the very idea of choosing yourself can feel selfish or frightening. Reading women and men who have done it anyway, in memoir, in fiction, in hard-won wisdom, gives you both permission and a map. These books will not make the choice for you, but they will remind you, again and again, that your own life is yours to live.

Choosing Yourself

Prescribed reading

For belonging to yourself

Quotes about choosing yourself to keep

Coming home to yourself

Reading for Choosing Yourself

Where should I start?

What can I read about putting myself first without guilt?

Which quotes about choosing yourself are worth keeping?

Can reading really help me choose myself?

More prescriptions await.