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A Time To Reflect
These quotes mostly deal with reflection. Either while you are going through something frustrating as hell, maybe feeling notalgic, or just seeking out words that perhaps don’t make you feel like it is just you out there.
When you’re one of a kind, you get targeted.
– Kiki
Sometimes I feel like a walking time bomb of undetonated memories.
— “#4MyNegusAndMyBishes (All Words Matter)” She’s Gotta Have It
[…] all the conversations are about ‘Oh, just be yourself! Oh, you have to love yourself! […]’ It’s like, it’s easy to be who you are when what you are is what’s popular. When what you are is reviled, it’s very difficult to do that.
— Billy Porter (The Breakfast Club 10/9/2017)
My twenties represented a time when I had no other obligation than to figure out who I was. I took the time I needed to just be—to learn how to advocate for myself before becoming an advocate for others. I was accountable to myself. It was a time for me to process the experiences that had shaped me and to be bold enough to seek new ones. It was a time for me to make mistakes and learn from them. It was a time for me to seek my voice, my purpose, and my place in the world. My twenties taught me to create and uphold much-needed boundaries, to take hold and possession of my body, and to stake a claim on my life. My twenties also taught me to improvise and to loosen up. Boundaries are vital, but at times I could be unmoving about these self-imposed restrictions, and that often prevented me from going where I truly wanted, from knowing others as I wanted to be known, from loving and being loved in the way I desired. My twenties prepared me to be seen fully—in my own eyes, in the eyes of the people I know and love, and in the eyes of the public I’ve invited into my life to know me. More than anything, it was my act of being in process during those messy, fun, and formative years—all the decisions and mishaps, all the highs and lows—that brought me to yet another dark room. This time, though, I was free, overwhelmingly secure in who I was and certain that she was—and would be—enough.
| — | “Afterword.” Surpassing Certainty |
He was kind enough, attractive enough, smart enough, but he never moved me in the way that made me feel obligated to him, that pressured me to be vulnerable. Our exchanges were limited to the kind you’d have with a great boyfriend but not necessarily a great love.
— “Part 2/ Chapter 11.” Surpassing Certainty
I wish I didn’t care what others think of me. I don’t want to care, but there’s something about having a nice bag or new clothes that makes you feel acceptable to the world.
— Chapter 22 – Page 106 [A Pain Less Ordinary]
I am not fishing for compliments. I promise. I know I am cute, but this is as good as it is going to get. I am at the peak of my beauty.
—“Part 2/Chapter 13” Surpassing Certainty
Pushing Thirty forces you to take stock.
—“Part 2/Chapter 13” Surpassing Certainty
There was this constant pressure to prove myself, but the moment I did as I was told, “leaned in,” asked for what I was worth, or showed confidence, I was labeled a diva. Yet if I didn’t excel, I would be overlooked.
—“Part 2/Chapter 12” Surpassing Certainty
People think I don’t know when I’m being picked on, but I do. I just don’t always know why, which, in some ways, is worse.
— “A Human Female.” Atypical
If I were to come across the same situation again, I’m sure I would do the same thing over and over again. But no matter what I do, I can’t deny the feeling that I could have done it better.
— “Mayoi Hell.” Owarimonogatari
I’m always mean to people I like. I think it’s ‘cause I expect so much.
— “Antartica.” Atypical
Pretending felt safest. I believed it was the only way I could make it. So I stripped myself of backstory and connection and flattened myself, distilled myself, made myself smaller and easier to contain and digest. I pretended that color, class, gender, and all the intersections of my identity and experience that othered me did not exist. And the funny thing was that my classmates, roommates, and neighbors were pleased to pretend, too. It made it easier on all of us to believe a post-racial, post-feminist, post-oppression fantasy, especially in a well-intentioned liberal New York City.
— “Part 2/ Chapter 9.” Surpassing Certainty
I was built to rely on myself and didn’t know how to ask for help or recognize that I could ask for help.
— “Part 2/ Chapter 9.” Surpassing Certainty
I yearned to be accepted on merit, on my work. I didn’t want to be a charity case, someone who was let in because she had a compelling story. I didn’t want to be someone who was brought in at the service of diversity alone, seen merely as a token.
— “Part 1/ Chapter 8.″ Surpassing Certainty
I suffered from imposter’s syndrome, not truly believing I was as smart as my grades, not as shiny as the awards I was given.
— “Part 1/ Chapter 8.″ Surpassing Certainty
I missed being with people whom I shared continuity. But I think we all crave those spaces, the ones where shared history acts as a thread holding us accountable to our former selves and to one another.
— “Part 1/ Chapter 6.″ Surpassing Certainty
“I had already been versed in code-switching [and] people would say to me, literally, ‘Oh, you’re not like the rest of them.’ […] ‘You’re smart, you know how to say words with ings, you know how to put Ts at the ends of your consonants, you can say ‘would.’ You know, those things set you apart.’ And what they really did was isolate me further from my community. They were really teaching me ‘Hey, these things make you more closer to whiteness’ and in truth, they don’t at all. They make me just speaking so I can be understood to […] supremacy. And then what will happen is, you’ll find yourself up in those white spaces and look around and realize, ‘Ah, I have not been extended a seat at the table, or at least I have not [been] extended the same meat at the table. I’m just near. At no point am I being allowed access. I’m just here to witness’ and once you realize that you go ‘Oh, it’s a trick! It’s a further trick to make you think or feel a way the very place that gave you life.’
— “Episode 6: Tarell Alvin McCraney.” Never Before with Janet Mock
Those are the regrets. Not the ones you said ‘no’ to but the ones you said ‘yes’ to.
— Jessica Lange (#THR Drama Actress Roundtable – 2017)
I’ve always had a push and pull between who they want me to be, who they think I am and who I actually am. And who I prefer to be.
— “Episode 7: Gabourey Sidibe.” Never Before with Janet Mock
My friendships […] I didn’t have any ability to look at them critically. I felt socially I was a creature trapped in amber who would accept anybody that was interested in me, I allowed a lot of energetic leeches into my life because I was so […] beaten down [by criticism] that anybody that would say to me, ‘I like you. You’re a good person’ I let those people in.
— “Episode 5: Lena Dunham.” Never Before with Janet Mock
I do not pray to ask God for things. I pray to thank God for bringing me where I am. To this time, to this place, where I finally know what I must do in this life.
— “Murder of Gods.” American Gods
I prayed that whatever my life was supposed to be, whatever my path was, I would finally be on it. I was only twenty-four years old, but I was tired of fear. I was tired of running away from something I could see into something I couldn’t.
— “Another Psychic Told Me so.” This Is Just My Face, Try Not To Stare (Page 190)
I just need someone to disagree with to clarify my own instincts.
— “Maybe It’s All The Disco.” GLOW
I’m tired of hearing my upstairs neighbors have sex. It feels like a super-inconvenient threesome.
— “Is This a Date?” This Is Just My Face, Try Not To Stare (Page 167)
[When asked if she thinks she doesn’t give people enough credit] I think when I first meet people I give them all the credit and then I slowly take it away.
— Jenny Slate
I only repeat myself in the vague hope that one day, somebody will actually hear me.
— This Beautiful Fantastic
I’m always someone’s experience or adventure. Then, eventually, they settle down with someone they can either predict or control.
— In The Morning
My body is like a phone in a silicon case. No matter what I do, I cannot smash.
“Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number” Chewing Gum: Season 2
We think silent people are good listeners. But I shut up so people leave me alone.
— It’s Only The End of the World
What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.
— “Chapter 2: Wall of Glass.” The Lonely City – Page 11 to 12
I wasn’t a lonely kid—I was good at being alone. I’d read books, play with the toy that I had, make up imaginary worlds. I lived inside my head. I still live inside my head. To this day you can leave me alone for hours and I’m perfectly happy entertaining myself. I have to remember to be with people.
“Chapter 2: Born a Crime” Location 490-492
— Born a Crime – Stories from a South African Childhood
Food, or the access to food, was always the measure of how good or bad things were going.
“Chapter 5: The Second Girl” Location 1090-1091
— Born a Crime – Stories from a South African Childhood
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