The presentation of self in everyday life. This guy Goffman had the idea that in different situations, you perform yourself differently. Your character isn’t static. It’s an adaptation.
I am so angry. And so happy to see him.
She confused being sick with being brave, and suffered agonies while imagining she merited praise for it.
So she did not replay, but played the strategist. She retained more power by withholding an answer.
No one here is a criminal. No one is an addict. No one is a failure.
One day when no one else was around, I went into the craft room at the back of the ground floor. I touched Gran’s collection of fabrics, the shiny bright buttons, the coloured threads. My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts of her sewing machine. I was pure liquid loss...
My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts of her sewing machine. I was pure liquid loss...
I can’t even say sorry,” she tells me. “There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.
It tasted like salt and failure.
Sometimes people are mean because they feel insecure about themselves.
She looked the same, looked just like anyone, but she saw the world differently after that. To be a physically powerful woman – it was something. You could go anywhere, do anything, if you were difficult to hurt.
A giant wields a rusty saw. He gloats and hums as he works, slicing through my forehead and into the mind behind it.
In a profound, symbolic gesture, I am giving you this bar of Vosges I got when we went to Edgartown. You can eat it, or just sit next to it and feel superior.
What fun we had, how beautiful we were.
We tossed stones into the water. We just existed.
Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound, then from my eyes, my ears, my mouth. It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps to the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.
I lie in my darkened room. Scavenger birds peck at the oozing matter that leaks from my crushed skull.
I am the center of the story now, Jule said to herself. I don’t have to weigh very little, wear very little, or have my teeth fixed. I am the center.
We’re not friends, Ms. Williams. You’re lying to me half the time, and I’m lying to you all the time.
If only she could go back in time, Jule felt, she would be a better person. Or a different person. She would be more herself. Or maybe less herself.