I was raised on the internet.
I mean, I – it’s so funny, I am, you know, I am, you know, a working woman out in the world, but I still live with my parents half the time. I’ve been sort of taking this very long, stuttering period of moving out.
You should always go where there is a ‘you-shaped’ hole in the world.
You don’t need to be flamboyant in your life to be flamboyant in your work.
You will find,” she says, “that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken.
You’ve learned a new rule and it’s simple: don’t put yourself in situations you’d like to run away from.
There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman.
Respect isn’t something you command through intimidation and intellectual bullying. It’s something you build through a long life of treating people how you want to be treated.
I have been envious of male characteristics, if not the men themselves. I’m jealous of the ease with which they seem to inhabit their professional pursuits: the lack of apologizing, of bending over backward to make sure the people around them are comfortable with what they’re trying to do. The fact that they are so often free of the people-pleasing instincts I have considered to be a curse of my female existence.
I didn’t know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do. At the moments it should logically strike, I am fit as a fiddle. On a lazy afternoon, I am seized by a cold dread.
Life is long, people change, I would never be foolish enough to think otherwise. But no matter what, nothing can ever be as it was. Everything has changed in a way that sounds trite and borderline offensive when recounted over coffee. I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe.
Girls are trained to say, ‘I wrote this, but it’s probably really stupid.’ Well, no, you wouldn’t write a novel if you thought it was really stupid. Men are much more comfortable going, ‘I wrote this book because I have a unique perspective that the world needs to hear.’ Girls are taught from the age of seven that if you get a compliment, you don’t go, ‘Thank you’, you go, ‘No, you’re insane.
It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.
That is because no one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, okay? So any mean thing someone’s gonna think of to say about me, I’ve already said to me, about me, probably within the last half hour.
I always reminded myself that this wasn’t exactly where I was meant to be, but pit stops are okay on the road of life, aren’t they?
You will find,” she says, “that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken.” I will use this line many times in the years to come, giving it as a gift to anyone who needs it.
The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action. It makes me want to take a nap.
Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it’s too late.
When she writes, which isn’t often, I get insanely jealous of the way her mind works, the fact that she seems to create for her own pleasure and not to make herself known.
I think about death, when I lie in bed and imagine disintegrating, my skin going leathery and my hair petrifying and a tree growing out of my stomach, it’s a way to avoid what’s right in front of me. It’s a way to not be here, in the uncertainty of right now.