Ashley C Ford Quotes

Kids can always tell the difference between adults who want to empower them, and adults who want to overpower them.

I did not know that there are miles between running out of things to say, and running out of the strength to say them.

I’ve heard people describe panic as something that rises up inside them. For me, panic radiates in the threads of my muscles, bangs in the back of my skull, twists my stomach, and sets my skin on fire. It doesn’t rise or fall. It spreads.

When you write about you and me? Just tell the truth. Your truth. Don’t worry about nobody’s feelings, especially not mine. You gotta be tough to tell your truth, but it’s the only thing worth doing next to loving somebody.

For the rest of my life, I would seek out the library the way some search for the soft light of a chapel in the dark.

When my life was new, I understood in my bones how little it mattered what anybody else was doing, or what they thought about what I was doing. I believed my bones then.

When you don’t grow up with a certain kind of affection, even if you know you’re worthy of it, it can be hard to accept in adulthood.

I wanted to be seen, but I didn't want to be watched.

No matter what you wanted to hide from yourself, you couldn’t hide it from the people whose particular brand of bent matched yours. The effort was moot. Weird kids always find each other.

she’d lost her voice somewhere down in her chest, somewhere they couldn’t reach in and grab it.

I was tempted, as I always am, to take the bait when my mother offers me empathy. Tempted by my fantastical belief that one day I will lower my walls, and she will do the same. Then I end up blaming myself for not remembering to stick to the conversational paths offering the least resistance, furious at myself for veering too far into the unexplored or exiled.

I learned to carry the secrets of my badness silently and alone.

My mother didn’t know I could do bad things and still have the sun. She didn’t know I could keep my own truth and memories inside. But I knew.

I did not mind getting hurt as much as I minded being surprised by the pain. I wanted to see it coming.

Ashley, you’re the only person who has to live in your skin, and wake up with the consequences of your choices. That’s why you can’t let other people make the big choices for you. You have to do what it feels right to do, and you can’t let anybody stop you.” I heard the stifled smile again. “Not even me.

When children are small, our desires seem small, even if we want the sky. Anything we want seems to be only a matter of time and effort away. It’s too early to imagine what’s already holding you back.

Despite everything my father had done, I was still so eager to be claimed by him. To be protected by him. To the world he was a bad man. To me, he was my dad who did a bad thing. I was still trying to figure out what it meant to love someone who had done such a bad thing, but I did love him. And that was enough for me to show up, and say so to his face.

If my mother and I shared anything without having carefully considered it, it was this undying ember of a dream that we will someday, somehow find ourselves reaping the bounty of a blooming mother-daughter bond, the roots of which we both refuse to tend in the meantime.

We don’t give up on our people. We don’t stop loving them.” She looked into my face, her eyes watering at the bottoms. “Not even when we’re burning alive.

It was easier to laugh at the jokes after you'd forgotten the pain.

though I tended to hold adults to impossible standards, I seemed to have infinite patience for children. Unlike some adults, I never quit remembering what it was like to be one. Their small plights were familiar to me, as were their big feelings.

My mother wasn’t perfect. Our relationship was complicated, and difficult. She was my imperfect mother. We were two different people, and found that hard to accept in one another. But I was hers and she was mine. That’s how it had always been. Who would I be, if not hers? I didn’t want to be without her.

I was an anxious driver. I was afraid of highways, and driving alone anywhere more than thirty minutes away scared me. Operating a vehicle is a lesson in individual control and mutual trust. I was skeptical of both.

wear. It doesn’t take long for children to teach themselves not to want what they’ve already learned they won’t have. I couldn’t find a good enough reason to torture myself by acknowledging my futile desires for more stuff.

Feeling any of it felt like the beginning of losing control, and losing control felt like certain death in my body, if not my mind. If I didn’t process the feeling, I wouldn’t feel it, and if I didn’t feel it, it couldn’t kill me.

It wasn’t lost on me that I mostly spoke my truth in the spaces where my family was absent.

I knew how to disappear. Sometimes my mother needed me to disappear.

The library felt too good to be true. All those books, on all those shelves, and I could just pluck them out, one by one, find an empty chair, and read, and read, and read.

I was sewn into his regrets.

When I turned out the light, nobody guessed I was in there telling myself stories, building safe spaces to go inside my head. They would walk right by me, never knowing I'd been there beside them in the dark.

I knew I couldn’t have the sunrise or its colors for my own. Some things were too precious not to be shared. They just had to happen, and you just had to make sure you were there when they did, and then, you were part of something with everyone else who showed up at the right time.

But each time I left campus to come home, I spent ten minutes in the mirror reciting the same phrase like my therapist had taught me: I like myself the way I am. I like myself the way I am. I like myself the way I am. I like myself the way I am. Then, I would promise myself not to forget.

It reminded me of my father’s letters telling me I was the best, the greatest, the most beautiful, and the only one. I didn’t believe a word, but I believed that someone else did, and as long as I could maintain that, it would be enough for me.

When I was four years old, I taught myself to lie awake until morning. I wanted the sunrise, and I only had to stay awake to have her. When children are small, our desires seem small, even if we want the sky. Anything we want seems to be only a matter of time and effort away. It’s too early to imagine what’s already holding you back.

We wanted to be good, as all children do, but as young Black children learn sooner than others, we don't all get the chance to be seen that way.

I am freer than you and that is worth all of the things I don't have.

It made sense it would take someone I’d never noticed who came out of nowhere to love me.

I decided to pretend to be good, the kind of good that seemed to be best. The silent kind.

We were lovers who lived together, trying to find out if we had whatever turned two people in love into the kind of family either of us wanted.

... books were a place where my age didn't matter as long as I could read the words in front of me, I found a home for my mind and spirit to take root.

There are few words worthy of the wonders they describe, but sunrise sounds like it feels. A u sunken to the bottom of one's throat, and an i, pointing upward and onward to a warm beyond.

I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t, tell on myself. Self-preservation had already been imprinted upon me as a requirement. Honesty was not always the best policy. Grown-ups would tell you it was important to tell the truth, and when you did, everything would work out, but I knew this wasn’t the case.

I wanted to assert my own style, which posed a problem, because I didn't really have any style. Grandma would shake her head at me and say, "Someday baby, you'll really understand how to dress. I'm just gonna pray on that for you.

Do me a favor, Ashley? When you write about you and me? Just tell the truth. Your truth. Don’t worry about nobody’s feelings, especially not mine. You gotta be tough to tell your truth, but it’s the only thing worth doing next to loving somebody.

The feeling started in my hand and creeped out into my already shifting body. I was not safe. Nothing about me was safe from drowning in the open air. It was my first panic attack. My Grandpa watched it happen until it was over, then he drove me home.

The sun had risen for me -for me alone- and turned the sky into the painted milk of a soggy bowl of leftover off-brand Lucky Charms. The soft roses and lavenders went on to burn blood orange on the underbellies of clouds. I told my shadow I wanted to keep the sun. My shadow whispered back the instructions for making a memory. I watched the light of day ascend until it hurt my eyes, then I closed them, and taught myself to remember.

Yes, Ashley, she told me. Now why are you still in my face?” She knew what I wanted, and she wanted me to know it would not be mine. We were locked in a power struggle, not that I would have known to call it that, and I was confused because I did not want power from my mother. I wanted her to acknowledge the pain in my body and heart.

To the world he was a bad man. To me, he was my dad who did a bad thing.

For the first time in my life, I didn't feel watched. My mistakes, however big or small, to the people around me, were just that; mistakes.

Brett was me because being me was too much sometimes, something I’d forgotten until that part was ripped away.

That I was an adult who was allowed to be frustrated with her annoyed her whether she verbalized it or not.

There was Mama, the loving mother we knew before whatever sparked her ire, and then there was Mother who showed up in her place.

My mother, who only cried like the tears were being ripped from her face, blubbered while she yelled at her boyfriend.

I couldn’t believe she said that! I sure did whoop her ass that day.” My mother’s face would split into the smile I rarely saw.

These things catch fire without letting each other go.

My mama encouraged us to sing our hearts open. There was music when we woke up, music in the car, music when we cleaned, music at family get-togethers.

We were a small underfunded school full of poor underserved kids, and even when we fought, we knew we were in it together and that we were all we had. We fought like family.

My friends were usually utterly charmed by my mother—she was her most magnetic around them, or anyone else on the outside really.

My mother never apologized.

A swell of gratitude for my grandmother, her photos, and her stories filled my chest. My father loved me, and my mother protected me.

Before my teacher showed me the bright pastels of morning light, I made friends with the dark in my grandmother's bedroom.

there are miles between running out of things to say, and running out of the strength to say them.

Don't. Ever. Give. A. Man. Your. Money.

Grandpa told me stories that would get hung up old, useless, and dry against my ribs, marking me as his kin.

Brett *was* me because being me was too much sometimes, something I'd forgotten until that part was ripped away.

We were a small underfunded school full of poor underserved kids, and even when we fought, we knew we were in it together and that we were all we had.

We smiled at each other, big real smiles, and I forgot anything and anyone else.

You'll learn to gut a fish like a man. Then, you won't need one.

He hadn’t grabbed or taken anything from me to make his point. He had offered me a bit of himself, the way he saw me, and I was as touched as anyone could be by the gesture.

It doesn't take long for children to teach themselves not to want what they've already learned they won't have.

One good friend was enough for me.

I thought Grandpa broke and ate everything that might love him. I didn't want to sit here and learn to do the same. But I was already here, gutting a fish like man as I knew what that meant.

I stared at them, doing my best to ignore the small splashing sound coming from an old white bucket next to the refrigerator. He’d caught a catfish earlier the same day. It had not wanted to be caught.

The loudest voice belongs to my brother, before he could properly pronounce my name, calling for me. “Hashy? Where are you? Where is my Hashy?” My brother loved me and made it so easy to believe I was good.

I wondered how many people I knew had already learned how to talk with God, and I wondered why God would only give a person one thing to say to him. Wouldn’t that get boring? Church was already boring enough.

My desire for a physical representation of my father’s love led to me pursuing parental relationships with all kinds of authority figures I came into contact with. They weren’t all aware of their parental status, but they were all important to me. Combined with my mother, they made up the perfect parental figures: proud of me, hard on me, and charmed by me. They were my Danny Tanners, Carl Winslows, and Aunt Beckys.

I learned to carry the secrets of my badness silently and alone. There would be no more confessions from me. Whoever wanted to know how bad I could be would have to get close enough to find out, and nobody tried.

When she corrected me, she did so with obvious care, and that counted for a lot with me. Kids can always tell the difference between adults who want to empower them, and adults who want to overpower them. She was the former.

Something cracked, and now I didn’t get to delight in the magic, but instead had to pretend like the adults. I’d done it to myself. In search of my shadow, I’d lost some of my childish wonder, and hadn’t realized it was a no-trade deal.

Grandpa sat at the table, sorting the edible parts of an almost-dead frog. His fingers bent and popped its sinewy limbs, separating the muscle from bone. The nearly departed performed a table dance for me. I was unimpressed. I wanted to be anywhere else in the world.

Truthfully, I’d been reading for school or to keep up with conversation for a long time. It felt good to read toward answers to the questions in my head, a familiar source of solace I hadn’t tapped in too long. It made me miss home even though I didn’t want to be there.

Truthfully, I’d been reading for school or to keep up with conversation for a long time. It felt good to read toward answers to the questions in my head, a familiar source of solace I hadn’t tapped in too long. It made me miss home even though I didn’t want to be there.

A few weeks of not having to take anybody’s shit, and I got really bad at taking it, especially as it dawned on me that she couldn’t make me stay there. For the first time, as my mother attempted to draft me into this familiar dance, I could just leave. I asked her to stop yelling.

It still felt good to be apologized to, no matter who it was meant for. Up until that point, no one had ever apologized for hitting me. I liked the way it made me feel, like I was worth feeling sorry over after someone hurt me, even if they didn’t mean it. Like it mattered that I hurt.

Living with my grandmother and her father in the fields of Missouri, I learned to think only of myself for hours at a time. Spending half a day alone, free of the company of people who would distract me from my being, I learned to think about who I was, who I was becoming, and what I wanted.

I trusted my mother to deliver the violence she’d promised upon anyone she believed violated something that belonged to her. She explained it was her job to protect me from those sick people, and so it was important for me to tell her the truth, so she could do her job. But telling the truth wasn’t enough. I had to make her believe me with my voice, and my body, and my face, which always seemed to be doing the wrong thing in those moments. I thought, if I can’t make her believe me, somebody could die. Somebody could die because my mother refused to believe I’m not a liar, and I couldn’t convince her otherwise.

I’d told myself before I got there, that I would refer to him as “Dad” because I was not a child. I was a grown woman, and I was pretty sure grown women didn’t call their fathers “Daddy.” But in that moment, I felt like someone’s little girl. And I’d been waiting a long time to feel like somebody’s daughter.

We had been in a relationship for six years, and were best friends for longer. He was my safest place, and he knew that was the case, had seen it for himself. We didn’t know, back then, there are about a million ways to love and be loved by another person. We thought what we had, the way we had it, was the only way it could be. We were stuck.

The only male teacher on the playground scooped the kid up in his arms, and ran to the school nurse. The rest of us stood around wondering what had happened to him. As usual, the adults told us nothing. One teacher blew her whistle at those of us still standing in a circle around the place he’d once stood. “You’re wasting time!” she yelled. “He’s gone. Go play.

For many years, I just didn’t try. The few times I did, for special occasions or at the behest of my grandmother, felt unnatural and like everyone could see how uncomfortable I was in my skin. Even if I looked glamorous in the moment, it seemed I was out of my body and keenly aware of everyone else’s eyes on me. Being on anyone’s radar because of how I looked made me feel like I was only seconds from ridicule.

she explained that right now, I was practicing being a good woman by being a good girl. However, when I turned twelve years old, every bad or wrong action I made would officially count against me in the eyes of God. She told me that God was watching me, but so were the demons, and they were waiting to see who I would decide to become, following the righteous or unholy breadcrumbs I’d left behind over the first twelve years of my life.

She knew what I wanted, and she wanted me to know it would not be mine. We were locked in a power struggle, not that I would have known to call it that, and I was confused because I did not want power from my mother. I wanted her to acknowledge the pain in my body and heart. I wanted it to mean something to her because she loved me, and I knew it, and I couldn't understand why she couldn't just say sorry. What was so wrong with me that I didn't deserve that?

I hopped down the few steps leading to our backyard, laid on my back in the grass, closed my eyes and tried to turn my father into a memory. With the sunlight dancing on my eyelids, I pictured my father carrying me from person to person in a crowd, eyes wide, teeth white and beaming, asking each one if they'd had the pleasure of meeting his baby. I pictured my mother admonishing him good-naturedly about the state of my clothes, but glowing with pride because I belonged to her, and I was still a miracle.

The photo I'd found of the four of us would be seared into my memory forever. Our bodies all wrapped around one another's, leaning forward as if we might break into a poorly choreographed tango or waltz at any moment. In the picture, we are frozen this way together, happy, sad, and afraid all at the same time. In the grass, where I made the memory I wanted to keep, we all dance out of the prison doors together, one family, with joy in our smiles and eyes. When we step outside, it is into deep and freshly fallen snow.

Mrs. Miller in her smock dresses, and round wire glasses, was done battling with me. Already we’d had it out over my sneezing too loud, talking too much, reading ahead, and disputing her assertion that we must all write every paper in cursive because it would be required of us in high school and college. I didn’t mind rules, but I didn’t appreciate being lied to by adults, and when I saw or heard it happening, I couldn’t shut up. Mrs. Miller desperately wanted me to shut up. And if I’m honest, I enjoyed making her feel that way.

The sun greeted me each morning whether I'd watched it rise or not. I prayed to God each night, like I'd been told. I could count my ABC's, sing along to the radio, and even remember how to tie my shoes if I practiced enough. These things were not hard to remember. But my father, far away, gone without an explanation, would fade away into the background of my four-year-old everyday life until I'd forgotten he'd ever been part of it at all. But before he went to jail, he was here, in a home with me and my mother. Before he was gone he loved me.

At night, I’d sit in bed and say to myself, “Everyone leaves. You’ll be okay. Everyone leaves. You’ll be okay.” I’d say it over and over until I could picture them leaving, until I could feel the tears on my cheeks. When I cried, I thought I could feel some of that inevitable pain, sparing my future self. It burned right in the center of me, and rolled my gut, but it kept my heart right where I thought it should be: inaccessible past a certain point. I did not mind getting hurt as much as I minded being surprised by the pain. I wanted to see it coming.

I tried not to think of what had happened to me. Most of the day, I could succeed in that mission. Then, a shock of ice-cold air on the wrong side of my face. The rattle of plastic meal trays against the hard metal counter during breakfast and lunch. Feeling too sad, or feeling surrounded, and I would be back on the roof of the shed, looking down at myself, pathetic and mumbling nonsense. I hated that place. I hated everything in my view, including the ball of rotten nothing called my body curled into itself on the floor. Why didn’t she get up? Why didn’t she go away? She never should have been there at all. Staring down at myself, I admonished her, blamed her, and only spoke enough to say, “Stop bothering me. Stop bringing me back here. We don’t belong to each other anymore. You made the choice to go in there. Now you can stay there.

At first, I didn’t know who Other People were, nor did I understand how concerned I should be about their perception of my actions good, bad, or otherwise. But I spent so much time with my grandmother, and she spent so much time talking about Other People, I eventually had some idea about the bad things they might say about me. They might say my clothes are too big, or small, or maybe even that they look old. If I’m hypervigilant about my personal hygiene, they might tell others about the time I used to stink. They might not be there for me. They might not love me. My grandmother didn’t see this as gossiping or being critical. She thought she was being helpful. Her fearful desire not to be “talked about” expressed itself as a constant monitoring of Other People’s behaviors and presentations of themselves, and she offered swift judgment whether the behavior or presentation was good or bad. Most were bad. This frustrated her to no end. Why weren’t people more careful? What kind of woman left the house without wearing lipstick? How could anyone let themselves get that fat? Who raised them? Who let them become this way? Didn’t they know Other People would talk about them?

Even if my life isn't the most interesting, tragic, hopeful, or exciting, my life is worth telling and worth sharing.