The Year of Yes, I realize, has become a snowball rolling down a hill. Each yes rolls into the next into the next and the snowball is growing and growing and growing. Every yes changes something in me. Every yes is a bit more transformative. Every yes sparks some new phase of evolution.
We are only on the edge of change. There is still so much more work to be done. I’m going to accept this award as encouragement and not as accomplishment. I don’t think the job is finished yet.
My own special formula involved red wine. And buttered popcorn.
The fact that someone paused to take the time to give me a compliment means something to me. No one is obligated to compliment you. They do it out of kindness. They do it because they want to. They do it because they believe the compliment they are offering. So when you negate someone’s compliment, you are telling them they are wrong. You’re telling them they wasted their time. You are questioning their taste and judgment. You are insulting them. If someone wants to compliment you, let them.
The insides of my brain are a fading photograph, stories and images drifting away to places unknown. Leaving patches of nothingness where a name or an event or a location should be. Anyone.
Being a mother brings us face-to-face with ourselves as children, with our mothers as human beings, with our darkest fears of who we really are.
Cristina Yang was the walking validation of my dreams.
I add words to the lexicon of daily conversation – maybe you talk about your vajayjay and tell your friend that someone at work got Poped because of my shows. I birth babies, I end lives. I dance it out. I wear the white hat. I operate. I gladiate. I exonerate.
I have spent years having a totally fulfilling, completely awesome friendship with a person who is only a stand-in for a figment of my imagination.
I mean that I am going to miss Cristina Yang so much that my heart hurts.
It’s like surgery. You can’t close the patient’s chest until you’ve found the wound and operated on it. The problem is the open chest, the wound is the challenge and the YES is the operation. You.
I never wanted to have to look at myself in the mirror and say that I didn’t try as hard as I could to make these shows work. That I didn’t give 100 percent to leave a legacy for my daughters and for all the young women of color out there who wondered what was possible. It irritated me to my core that we live in an era of ignorance great enough that it was still necessary for me to be a role model, but that didn’t change the fact that I was one. I.
I was baptized Catholic but I was Church of Oprah. If you are a person on.
Being a mother is incredibly important. To the naysayers, I growl, do not diminish it by calling it a job.
We can choose to be afraid of it, to stand there trembling not moving, assuming the worst that can happen or we can step forward into the unknown and assume it will be brilliant.
You have to be okay with being better than everyone else.
It irritated me to my core that we live in an era of ignorance great enough that it was still necessary for me to be a role model, but that didn’t change the fact that I was one.
Motherhood means I’m always a little bit awake, a little bit alert at all times.
Hate diminishes, love expands.
I have been saying yes to being fat. Which is WHY I’m now so fat. I’m not a failure; I’m successfully fat. I didn’t let go of the wheel; I just turned the car down the fat road.