I feel like there are fifty ways it’s my fault. I fantasized. I took the big pill and the small pill, stuffed myself with substances to make being out in the world with people my own age a little easier. To lessen the space between me and everyone else. I was hungry to be seen. But I also know that at no moment did I consent to being handled that way.
As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter.
If we follow the Buddhist logic that we are becoming part of glory of the universe, one huge consciousness, well, that’s just too much togetherness for my taste. I couldn’t even do a group art project in second grade. How am I going to share understanding with the rest of the creation? If this proves to be the case, I’m too much of a loner for death, but I’m also scared of being lonely. Where does that leave me?
She has a taste for unusual women, with strong noses and doll eyes and creative dispositions.
Later in the summer your grandfather dies, and you’re secretly glad. You have a place to put all your sorrow now, one that people will understand.
It’s become horribly and offensively popular to say that someone is on the autism spectrum, so all I’ll say is his inability to notice when I was crying had to be some kind of pathology.
The anxiety that has followed me through my life like a bad friend had reappeared with a vengeance and taken a brand-new form... I didn’t know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do.
D. J. Tanner called and she wants her wardrobe back so it can be included in a museum retrospective about the prime years of Full House.
She asks me my worst quality, and I say I can be very self-involved. She says hers is that she gets lost in the world of her work and can’t find her way back out again.
Family first. Work second. Revenge third.
Drunk emotions aren’t real emotions.
Let this book take you to the stars and beyond.
And I decided then that I will never be jealous. I will never be vengeful. I won’t be threatened by the old, or by the new. I’ll open wide like a daisy every morning. I will make my work.
The way I saw it, I was fully capable of being treated with indifference that bordered on disdain while maintaining a strong sense of self-respect. But that isn’t how it works. When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself.
I’ve always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for. When I was little, my mother would come home from a party, her hair cool from the wind, her perfume almost gone, and her lips a faded red, and she would coo at me “You’re still awake! Hiiii.” And I’d think how beautiful she was and how I always wanted to remember her stepping out of the elevator in her pea-green wool coat, thirty-nine years old, just like that.
But surveying those words I realized they are mine. He is mine to protect. There is so much I’ve shared, and so much that’s been crushed by the sharing. I never mourned it, because it never mattered.
That being said, it’s horrible when people you hate get things you want.
After all, desire is the enemy of contentment.
What a goon. He’s lucky to know you, but too stupid to ever realize it.
Is what’s manifesting as a fear actually some instinct to resist being young? Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it’s too late. Is the sense of imminent death bound up in the desire to leave some kind of a legacy?