For You, Forever Ago

Why don’t we talk about it? How good it feels. And if you don’t know then you’re lucky but also you poor thing.

I randomly started writing in high school, and I loved it. It was freeing because I grew up feeling very invisible. Most writing I read expressed my absence, but now, I could articulate my presence.

A lot of things are innate to a woman’s experience in the world and also in the music scene. The shared empathy we have for one another is access to a cult I didn’t know I had an in for. I had to find the door and whisper some secret word. I needed to be vulnerable in a new way.

A peak is just the way towards a descent. You have nowhere to look. Look around not ahead.

If you get obsessed enough, the work will tell you what to do.

One of the things that I’ve come to believe is that when people ask themselves that question about who am I — a very difficult question to answer — but one of the ways in which we can answer it is with what we love. And the closer you are to what you love, the more time you spend inside that love, the more what you love opens up and becomes bigger and expands, and you expand. The more time you spend away from love, away from what you love, the less you grow.

Still, the rudest editor is the one that you encounter before a pen even touches the page, right? The one in your mind that says, “No, you can’t write about that.

I felt the fear descending upon me the way a colorful parachute does in a childhood game of cat and mouse. He talked, he laughed, he watched me try not to blink. I always blinked. What is the verb? To savor. To luxuriate in torturing another. Sadism. If someone does this to you, do not give in to the temptation to smile. I tell myself to be the strong woman my mother taught me to be and not smile, but I almost always do.

I think everyone’s life is so much more valuable and interesting and important than whatever social constraints are being placed upon them.

I had created this public persona, this public illusion, and it held me hostage. I couldn't be a real person, because you're too afraid of what your public will say. At that point, I had to do some dying.

We must acknowledge that the real substance of life has nothing to do with money or power or prestige or greatness. Your money and your power must be given away (as tax and tithe and service to others). To gain your life is to lose it. To lose your life is to gain it. The life you live is not your own. Give your life away.

The pressure to assimilate says different things to different people: change your name, your accent, your nose; straighten or dye your hair; stay in the closet; pretend the Pilgrims were your fathers; become baptized as a christian; wear dangerously high heels, and starve yourself to look young, thin, and feminine; don’t gesture with your hands; value elite European culture above all others; laugh at jokes about your own people; don’t make trouble; defer to white people; smile when they take your picture; be ashamed of what you are. To assimilate means to give up not only your history but your body, to try to adopt an alien appearance because your own is not good enough, to fear naming yourself lest name be twisted into label.