Bullying doesn't stop just because the bullies grow up. In seventh grade, Maggie Camden was the class outcast. Every day, the other girls tripped her, pinched her, trapped her in the bathroom, told her she would be better off dead. Four years have passed since then, and Maggie’s tormentors seem to have moved on. The ringleader of them all, Raleigh Barringer, even moved out of town. But Maggie has never stopped watching for attacks, and every laugh still sounds like it’s at her expense. The only time Maggie feels at peace is when she’s hiking up in the mountains with her best friend, Nick. Lately, though, there’s a new sort of tension between the two of them—a tension both dangerous and delicious. But how can Maggie expect anything more out of Nick when all she’s ever been told is that she’s ugly, she’s pathetic, she’s unworthy of love? And how can she ever feel safe, now that Raleigh Barringer is suddenly—terrifyingly—back in town?

This book will help you to halt in your tracks and rethink the way in which you're living your life. Viveca has had impressive life experiences that we should all seek to embrace and adopt as our own.

The human heart was created with a great capacity to love. But along with that comes a great capacity to feel pain. There is no denying that those who love us, who are closest to us, can wound us the most profoundly. That kind of pain can be difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. And it can feel even more impossible to continue loving in the face of it. Yet that is exactly what we are called to do. Sharing his own story of personal pain, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Jentezen Franklin shows us how to find the strength, courage, and motivation to set aside the hurt, see others as God sees them, and reach out in love. Through biblical and modern-day stories, he discusses different types of relational disappointment and heartache, and answers questions such as Why should I trust again? and How can I ever really forgive? The walls we build around our hearts to cut us off from pain are the very walls that block us from seeing hope, receiving healing, and feeling love. Here are the tools and inspiration you need to tear down those walls, work through your wounds, repair damaged relationships, and learn to love like you've never been hurt.

In If It Hurts, It Isn't Love, author Chuck Spezzano finds truth in simple insights: What I think I need is what I am called to give. Depression is the fear that something new will leave me. When someone gets angry at me, there is a lesson for me to learn. Jealousy is a birthing place. These principles show how to look afresh at one's most important relationships, in a way that heals pain and brings love and forgiveness. After each principle, the author gives brief exercises that nudge readers further, prompting them to absorb the insights even more deeply.

Loving Music Till It Hurts explores how people's intense love and protectiveness of music can lead to interpersonal conflicts, societal injustices, and violence. But how might we love music, even embrace it as vital to human thriving, without weaponizing this love? What can we do when loving music and loving people seem at odds?

"Love is your destiny. It is the purpose of your life. It is the key to your happiness and to the evolution of the world." Loveability is a meditation on love. It addresses the most important thing you will ever learn. All the happiness, health, and abundance you experience in life comes from your ability to love and be loved. This ability is innate, not acquired. Robert Holden is the creator of a unique program on love called Loveability, which he teaches worldwide. He has helped thousands of people to transform their experience of love. "Love is the real work of your life," says Robert. "As you release the blocks to love you flourish even more in your relationships, work, and life." In Loveability, Robert weaves a beautiful mix of timeless principles and helpful practices about the nature of true love. With great intimacy and warmth, he shares stories, conversations, meditations, and poetry that have inspired him in his personal inquiry on love. Key themes include: • Your destiny is not just to find love; it is to be the most loving person you can be. • Self-love is how you are meant to feel about yourself. It is the key to loving others. • When you think something is missing in a relationship, it is probably you. • Forgiveness helps you to see that love has never hurt you; it is only your misperceptions of love that hurt. • The greatest influence you can have in any situation is to be the presence of love.

Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience. Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love. The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire. This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.

Thirty biblical meditations for women that offer hope in times of suffering. Thirty biblical meditations for women that offer hope in times of suffering. Hurt is real. But so is hope. Kristen and Sarah have walked through, and are walking in, difficult times. So these thirty biblical reflections are full of realism about the hurts of life-yet overwhelmingly full of hope about the God who gives life. This book will gently encourage and greatly help any woman who is struggling with suffering-whether physical, emotional or psychological, and whether for a season or for longer. It is a book to buy for yourself, or to buy for a member of your church or friend. For anyone who is hurting, this book will give hope, not just for life beyond the suffering, but for life in the suffering. Each chapter contains a biblical reflection, with questions and prayers, and a space for journaling.

Finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award "The magnificence of Hold It 'Til It Hurts is not only in the prose and the story but also in the book's great big beating heart. These complex and compelling characters and the wizardry of Johnson's storytelling will dazzle and move you from first page to last. Novels don't teach us how to live but Hold It 'Til It Hurts will make you hush and wonder."--Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead "This rich and sophisticated first novel brings together pleasures rarely found in one book: Hold It 'Til It Hurts is a novel about war that goes in search of passionate love, a dreamy thriller, a sprawling mystery, a classical quest for a lost brother in which the shadowy quarry is clearly the seeker’s own self, and a meditation on family and racial identity that makes its forerunners in American fiction look innocent by comparison."--Jaimy Gordon, National Book Award winner for Lord of Misrule When Achilles Conroy and his brother Troy return from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, their white mother presents them with the key to their past: envelopes containing details about their respective birth parents. After Troy disappears, Achilles--always his brother’s keeper--embarks on a harrowing journey in search of Troy, an experience that will change him forever. Heartbreaking, intimate, and at times disturbing, Hold It ’Til It Hurts is a modern-day odyssey through war, adventure, disaster, and love, and explores how people who do not define themselves by race make sense of a world that does. T. Geronimo Johnson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Best New American Voices, Indiana Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Illuminations, among others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Johnson teaches writing at the University of California-Berkeley. Hold It 'Til It Hurts is his first book.