Jenny Slate Quotes

As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.

I am supposed to be touched. I can’t wait to find the person who will come into the kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?

As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love.

I am tired of sinking down to a lower place to be with men. I am tired of throwing a tarp over some of my personality so that the shape of my identity suits some gross man a little better for whatever shitty things he needs to do in order to keep his boring identity erect and supreme.

I am that mysterious stranger that I hoped to meet. I met her at a dark dance. We came here to live together until I could stay by myself. The place is here. The time is now. This is all my lifetime.

Each time I fall in love I feel fear that the world won't let me be in the world with it, that I either have to pick the world or the love.

The more you give, the more you have, the more new things you are a part of, the more you are truly alive.

I think I've come to terms with the fact that there will always be a ribbon of loneliness running through who I am.

I take it as a sign that it is all right to be alive as I am, just as I am, and to keep trying.

I can’t become smaller to fit into a crouching love in somebody else’s meager world. I don’t do that anymore. I have calmed down. I have consolidated. I have come through the reckoning that I required.

I was born as sweet as that and if I am too sweet for your tastes then just clamp your mouth shut and spin on your heels. I can’t add sourness to my sap anymore just to fit onto a menu in a restaurant for wimps

Who will meet me at once in all of my worlds and pump with all of my hearts? To have to kill even one of my hearts to match up with you is simply not worth it to me, after all that has happened.

I'd rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts.

So now there is not even anyone to dream about, and what an odd feeling. I don’t have the strength to put together the features of a fantasy face. I am heartbroken over no one, over having nobody to wish for, nobody to hope for. I am heartbroken, usually, over someone. Now I am heartbroken over no one

Well, I am so sensitive and I am very fragile but so is everything else, and living with a dangerous amount of sensitivity is sort of what I have to do sometimes, and it is so very much better than living with no gusto at all. And I’d rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts.

I’m tired of looking for a place in another.

But what am I supposed to do with all of the parts of my heart that are only there to be given?

Sometimes I enact destruction just to reenact my faith that things can be built up again. But I'm trying to stop the first part of that and just have the faith.

Information about art and nature feels like the best stuff to have, and if you have it, it is powerful and excellent to pass it on.

I’m stuck here in a cycle and I am getting older but I am not growing up and my heart is getting soft dark spots on it like a fruit that has gone bad or is soft because too many hands have squeezed it but then put it back down not because I am not ready but because they were not ready for my type of fruity flesh. I felt so ripe and sweet—what was off? The truth is, I was forcing myself into people’s mouths. I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up.

A psychic recently looked right into the eternal cosmos and then returned to me with this elegant yet cryptic message: Grow up.

When people get a glimpse of me I’d like them to feel like it is a good omen.

It is a certain type of person who feels this way that I feel, and I'm proud to be one, and now I see that I must really not forget that the style of what I find beautiful is incredible to me, that it is incredible to feel lucky to want to want what one wants, to be able to see the rings of yourself this way.

Yes, there have been lots of feelings that have felt like breaths in with no out breaths.

What if I got a crown for doing nothing but being who I am,

If I could remember anything, I would remember my belief that my extra love could just be used on myself.

It occurs to me as I fight so hard with myself that these cruel and persistent voices are the echoes of trauma from the times when people treated me like I am now treating myself.

Please come close enough so that I can see you, and then I will try to do the rest for both of us, because I have not learned my lesson yet and do not possess the faith to believe in the partner who does his side of the thing. But I would love it if you would, because that would be dreamy and then I would also have that faith. I will give you every single treat.

Look! Look at this woman who is both the emergency and the relief. Let me be both (I have no choice). Give in. Fall apart. Look at the pieces. Reassemble. This is the essential movement of my holy flux.

even when I am happy, it sometimes happens that the slightest things can tip me into nonspecific sadness when I am alone.

Sometimes do you ever get jealous of the plants, that they only have to grow and not know about it, and they don’t take anything personally?

Who will let me be the real animal of myself?

I have wondered on many occasions if any confidence I have is just a weird side effect of foolishness and I live under the weight of so much embarrassment, I’m surprised the top of my head isn’t flat.

It occurs to me that if anyone ever bullies me again I will warn them one time but probably start to stop loving them, and that if they do it again I will have my final answer, that a person who does that to me does not love me. And then I will explain that their behavior has made it clear to me that I want to leave, and although I will have been clear, I will have been respectful, I will leave without participating in condemnation. I will go without digging deeper into the dark.

My vulnerability is natural and permissible and beautiful to me, and it should remind you of your responsibility to behave like a friend to me and the world.

For a while I would have trench-times, when everything felt like blank paper, and I couldn't feel anyone's heart pointed even in my direction, let alone anyone loving me or wanting me to be around. Very boring, very lonely, very tired, again. It was hard to feel anything except "I am not one of the creatures who will experience anything precious.

My heart can feel like an elephant who is feeling dread and has an exceptional memory and naturally possesses something valuable that might be hunted, poached, wasted.

To have to kill even one of my hearts to match up with you is simply not worth it to me, after all that has happened.

This is what makes my mother my mother. She loves the flower and she wants me to know this flower, but she will only smell it once, and then give it to me for unlimited sniffing pleasure and she will be happy about it all.

The women were new friends but I loved them in a massive way. The love was like a large trove of devotion that could only be amassed over time, but it had arrived all at once. The way I loved them felt like it was from long ago.

I want to look out a window at something bright and wide, and at that point accept my nature and understand my intended use and have a clean shirt and clean hands and feel similar to a small planet.

I was born on the boundary line between cold and hot, at the intersection of the two elements that make a clap of thunder.

But what is so hard is that even when I die my light still stays on.

I was born bucking the idea that I should have to be anywhere that I don’t like or talk to people who make me feel dead or trapped.

All I want to do is disappear deeply into my own thing and you can decide whether or not to join but I’m pretty much going to enter my own vortex.

It occurs to me, even as I’m not sure what’s left of me, that I can use what is still alive to really behave in a way that I admire.

But back to the sea captain and his broken heart. I somehow always felt that this was my story as well. Maybe because I was so obsessed with what it would feel like to one day fall in love, to have another person who loved you the most, and loved you so much, voluntarily, that it became involuntary.

That is an act of power, showing what you know, giving it to another person, realizing that as you spread it, you get to keep it but watch it grow, and by watching others have it, you learn new things about the original thing.

Look at me and say, "Oh, I really shouldn't," just because you want to have me so very much.

I love myself. I think that I am a very top-quality person.

If you let me onto your land, I might be very wild, and I will not be able to totally change myself, but you can always track me by the tinkle of my lively clamor.

There has been a misunderstanding about wildness. Bring it in, bring it in, bring wildness in and care for it.

Your feelings of joy are not fake if you are having them! You are allowed to feel joy about sitting on the lap of a dog in a dream, and taking a ride in a van with open windows and sharing a seatbelt. God dammit, this is a gift from your fucking soul! Self-generate, don’t you see? Break the trap break the trap break the trap leave the trench!

There are no odds to beat anymore, just some real junk to dump. You dump your junk. After you dump it, you don’t sort it in your mind. You dump your junk and you walk away. You wear all one color on the outside, swirl with every color on the inside. You walk forward. You keep your head angled up so that you see over the fray. You protect yourself and all the little weirds that make up who you are.

You won’t let the idiots and the assholes get past the front gate of your heart. They can yell from the sidewalk. They can yell terrible things, because they are shut

They were part of a forest, an ecosystem that is perfect because of its wide variety of species, dominant because nothing is not allowed to be there. In the forest, everything that is inclined to thrive really does, and has a job, and some jobs are to grow things up and some jobs are to take things apart and everything is accepted because there is no notion—among bacteria and moss and busy mice—there is no notion of who deserves to do something or be in a place. There are only lives to be lived, and they are everywhere.

I cover my body with a fabric that has been made into a certain shape to help remind you of my butt and vagina, but it does not show the actual butt or vagina that I have.

I said goodbye to all of them and I felt very odd. Something had happened but nothing had happened, really. Nobody touched me but it felt like I had been touched.

you do know that telling people things is not the same as living by the principle of the things, right?

Why would a woman have a bra if she was making a snack in her natural habitat, which is of course a house by the sea?

I am connected to eternity and I am part of everything and although I am with all of it, I am still different from anything and everything. I am an example of a specific way of spending time and feeling existence in this world.

Look at you! You have done what the earliest geniuses have done: You have taken the most basic thing and elevated it. If you are sweet inside of yourself for the most part, this is the truth you will know.

And sometimes I enact destruction just to reenact my faith that things can be built up again. But I’m trying to stop the first part of that and just have the faith.

I believe that wildness belongs in people.

But when I stop feeling pleasure and stop imagining things I also forget my beliefs, the things that float my spirit on this sea.

Your heart is factually a part of the universe, which is a miracle of endless force and boundless beauty. There is literally no way that you are not part of that. Despair can force you to turn your eyes away from this fact, but it is the real truth and it will be waiting to be with you when you are free enough to turn back to it.

What can I do? I can only breathe in deeply. I can only bellow in a church that is deep inside of myself. I can only blast a shell-shaped horn that would shake down the oldest buildings. I can only leap for joy in my sacred inner caves and ring out the message: I am alive. I woke up again. I might as well be sprouting leaves, I might as well be covered in little clams.

One by one, I must forgive the shames and cruelties I have slung at myself for choices made at desperate moments, or for spending so long waiting for literally anyone but myself to tell me that I am indeed the creature that I suspect I am.

The super-ego is reiterative. It repeats the most boring, pointy, hurtful things, and if you met it at a party, if it were a person, you would think that the person was not only mean and insane, but also not as smart as they think they are. You wouldn’t listen. You would think they were a shithead.

If I deny that the root is in me, I will never change.

Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?

When people get a glimpse of me I'd like them to feel like it is a good omen.

I know that to be seen is to be taken in

It is so hard because I was born with a love of useful rules but also somehow I am always dropping and breaking them and it makes me feel very bad.

A day at the beach was never so dull as it is now. I recycle the same daydreams over and over—

Life has been so discouraging that I have forgotten why and how to fantasize, and I feel weak.

I wanted him to understand that “being vulnerable” is a different thing for everyone, is a developed and specific skill involving personally specific actions that are terrifying.

You will be cleaned by your own focus, by not being seduced into self-indulgence.

You will become a peaceful authority who says no to that voice that wants to undermine and splash you with the gloop of self-doubt in an effort to stall your emergence.

I felt so ripe and sweet—what was off? The truth is, I was forcing myself into people’s mouths. I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up.

You are dear to yourself in the morning and it is the morning now. It is very private to have such a love for yourself. Closer, closer to the curtain. How funny, your face is right right against the curtain now. How funny to know what side of it you are on! You are asleep! How wonderful to pay attention.

I stuff each breast into a cotton cup-bag, and the bags are sewn together as a pair of bags for boobs, and the pair of boob-bags is held on by straps because I guess this helps the boobs from not floating past the mountains and white puffs and into outer space?

Hello, I am a woman here on this ancient ball that rotates with a collection of other balls around a bigger ball made up of lights and gasses that are science gasses, not farts. Don’t be immature.

The reason I think that it will be hard to meet someone who I am actually interested in is that I cannot stand these preliminary moments when you can’t deeply know each other and be together forever.

You have my permission to come into this space that is made out of broken-up pieces, of shards and perfect circles, slats and slices. It represents the space that I have found to house my spirit, which is from the universe. I was born to host this party. To be in the party, remind you of the party, live at the event, die at the event.

All of the people who love me, all of my family who have loved me, have never left me. They gather from their other dimensions, and they make a small family party. They prepare all of the food and they do all of the talking. They are not visiting, they have descended into a place that exists as a perpetual home for anyone in our family ever. We come here to be born, to give birth, to die, and then when we are dead we attend all events. All of my dead relatives proclaim, with their presence here, that we are an unbroken group. And they say, “We have always been loving you and we have never left you.

In the mornings of my life, I wake up and I blink my eyes open and I stretch my body with a shudder that holds tension like a string pulled so tight that it makes a musical sound when you pluck it with one finger.

Information about art and nature feels like the best stuff to have, and if you have it, it is powerful and excellent to pass it on. That is an act of power, showing what you know, giving it to another person, realizing that as you spread it, you get to keep it but watch it grow, and by watching others have it, you learn new things about the original thing.

Without a person to love, I am too full of what must be let out, and while at least I can use my mind enough to bring out this image of this sea, it feels like life is the beach in the winter. It feels like life is the beach where I used to go with someone who died. It feels almost wrong to be here . .

You can create and raise the child, but the spirit...the spirit comes from the universe

everything is art and nature and so are you

I am heartbroken over no one, over having nobody to wish for, nobody to hope for.

It is hard to even describe what it's like to have someone use your own revelation of suffering as a way to accuse you of being cruel.

I am the live thing that belongs here, with other live things like this.

An intention was inside of me already when I traveled from infinity to a kitchen with a windowsill, to a wish, to a woman.

Look! Look at this woman who is both the emergency and the relief. Let me be both (I have no choice).

It's an earned privilege to go to bed knowing that you were kind, and one needs to re-earn it every day, and it's harder than expected but worth it.

I am a plant and I have a fragile green stem and my flower is still in the pod on the top of the stalk, unopened, when the dawn strolls in over the horizon. My blossom spreads out during the day and it goes into the pod at night and then it goes again the next day and all of the days.

He has packed his toothbrush. It feels like pleasure to him but also too urgent, it feels like starving as he thinks about how full he would feel, how filling it would be to stand next to me in his pajamas and me in my pajamas and us both using our toothbrushes, looking at ourselves and each other in the mirror. He thinks that it is so precious that he knows that it would be a privilege to be allowed in to my evening. He thinks in layers when he thinks about how he loves me.

I have always known that I would die for love. I think I am dying while or because of waiting for it. I cannot bear how it feels like a surging throng of beats and yells and gasps inside of my small form. I have wondered on many occasions if any confidence I have is just a weird side effect of foolishness and I live under the weight of so much embarrassment, I’m surprised the top of my head isn’t flat.

I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that there will always be a ribbon of loneliness running through who I am. But that’s why I want to do comedy, and why I want to connect with people. You can use that ribbon to be a part of a finer tapestry, or you can choke yourself out with it! Your choice! But I’m not gonna get rid of it. But do I want to live as a depressed person who’s afraid of other people and bummed out by the makeup of my personhood? No. So I’ll find a way.

Hello? Tonight I am going to the Restaurant, where I will eat a killed and burned-up bird and drink old purple grapes and also I will gulp clear water that used to have bugs and poop and poison in it but has been cleaned up so that it doesn’t make us blow chunks. Oh Joy I am going to the Restaurant and I am just drooling at the thought of the killed and burned bird and I want to sip the grape gunk and so I put skin-colored paint all over my face and I dab pasty red pigment on my lips and swish peachy powder on my cheeks and I take a pencil and draw an eye-shaped line around my eye so that people know where my blinkers are.

where your body used to be in the bed, thinking thoughts like, “If I can’t have him then I will bring the sky down into the bed, one kiss at a time, and then it will be like I am in the cosmos with him.” It was a fun activity that helped me fall asleep.

When I imagine my ingredients, I imagine that my muscles are made of plums, that my heart is a giant ruby with a light bulb in it, that my blood is goldenrod yellow, and the bones inside my body are made from lions' bones and shells, and that my brain is made of steak and silk and Hawaiian Punch.

So now there is not even anyone to dream about, and what an odd feeling. I don’t have the strength to put together the features of a fantasy face. I am heartbroken over no one, over having nobody to wish for. Nobody to hope for. I am heartbroken, usually, over someone. Now I am heartbroken over no one.

The dog’s butthole fell out while he was pooping and they got an operation to put it back in.

and even when I am happy, it sometimes happens that the slightest things can tip me into nonspecific sadness when I am alone.

I am that woman from the wish

I had, always, a wild call that I wanted to ring out to the whole world. I knew it always.

Your heart is a planet. I can see that you are from the sky.

As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love

There's no point in trying anymore. Just get down to the bottom. Just be a heap.

I think the air smells best when all of the tree smells get swirled up by a storm. Big old trees on my street listen to me and watch me in a nice way like I am their niece.

A stranger helped me. Specifically, he helped me look into outer space. I said thank you, obviously.

There is a feeling that by doing the natural thing of growing up, I have carelessly waltzed away from a mess.

I am the live thing that belongs here, with other live things like this

This is what I think about as I crack a Miller High Life and vaguely decide that I should not continue to have cyclical relationships with gross men,

the thoughts were not just within me but were the main citizens of my world and they were mobilizing and marching to get me.

I'm sure you can't bake it all away, but you can transform the reality while still accepting the essential elements that make it what it is.

Life is what you make it,” she’d say, “not what I make it. Your life is a blank slate. Dream it up just the way you want it, and then go get it. It’s your own masterpiece to create.

And even though my head was on backwards and my brain felt, you know, not at its best, I was still aware that two very bad choices were being shoved at me: Tell him that he’s right or at least on the right track and therefore lie and also abandon myself and cause more damage by letting his ignorance and monologue go on forever, or tell him NO, he is not even close to correct, that the fact that he is pontificating and instructing and not actually conversing is a sign that he does not even remotely understand. But then after saying that I would have to weather the storm of his humiliation and frustration, and somehow end up feeling bad about myself, like I should have been gentler and treated him like a child who simply doesn’t know any better.

I believe that wildness belongs in the home. I believe this and so I belong in myself and in my home. My gods are inside of me first and foremost, and the mother of all of them is the wild one.

I guess the trick of the treat is that I left it there for you because I had too much of the troublesome ingredient with me for so long and I needed to make it into something else and give it away. It is too much for one person, isn’t it? And if you eat it, maybe you will know how full of it I felt, but also how much sweetness I have been holding for you, inside of myself, in so many colors and forms.

when you died, the spark of your life flew into me when I watched your breath stop, and the spark did its last energy frizz inside of me and I didn't tell anyone but half of the lights of myself went off as well. Almost every door in me closed too. Most of the space, where you used to tread, to rest, to read, to sleep, most of that space closed up for good. I became a house with only the porch light on.

Before, when I would complain of being tired it was always a subliminal plea to be treated nicely, to be loved, to have you all know how hard I’ve worked for you and that I wanted to be admired and thanked.

I would get up just to smell you and give you kisses on your back in the shape of what I could remember of Orion. I could remember mostly just the belt, which is dear but not very impressive. Over and over again on your back every night, the belt. One, two, three cosmic smooches from me to you until you died and then I died, but sometimes in the time before I died and after you died I kissed three stars into the air of

I was a baby and I was running around and my mother didn’t know what to do because her baby was so rowdy and speedy compared to other babies she knew. She couldn’t lock me up or tell me to slow down because I didn’t know why I should listen to her and I just wanted to go fast, so what happened was that she put the little bells on my shoes and that way I was free to roam and she could hear me as I ran ringing through the house.

What am I supposed to do with this memory now? I know that the wise answer is that I should let it be, but there's so much shame in having a bright, hopeful start and a heavy, lead-footed, choked-up end. I want to put this moment forth like a picture that you slide across the table and you say, "This was this. I was here." When your life breaks apart it's hard to know if you are allowed to keep little pieces that are still nice-looking, or if you have to crush them up in order to move on. Do I have to ruin everything that survived the blast in order to accept that the blast occurred? That seems like a bit too much. Do we have to live with shards, carry them around, have new little cuts all the time? Or can these moments be rounded and just left floating in the attic of a nice old beach house, the one I don't live in yet, the one where I will live when I am old, the oldest person on the planet, the softest crone. When I asked my father this question, "What am I supposed to do with this moment now?" he told me to be unashamed while mentioning it, and to consider the idea that some people stay with you in a group, while others drift away. But the reliving of that moment causes me sharp pain, and I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it and my guess is that I'm not, because of the damage I will do or reveal within myself.

occurs to me that if anyone ever bullies me again I will warn them one time but probably start to stop loving them, and that if they do it again I will have my final answer, that a person who does that to me does not love me.

I am tired of throwing a tarp over some of my personality so that the shape of my identity suits some gross man a little better, for whatever shitty things he needs to do in order to keep his boring identity erect and supreme.

You won't let the idiots and the assholes get past the front gate of your heart. They can yell from the sidewalk. They can yell terrible things, because they are shut out and can't stand to be let go, but you will not let them in now.

There is a feeling that by doing the natural thing of growing up, I have carelessly waltzed away from a mess. It feels that I have disowned my tribe by choosing to believe that the world is full of creatures and spirits rather than predators and ghosts.

I was born as a breakfast pastry in the fancy part of France and hours after I was born I was still warm from the heat of the oven. I knew that my warmth and lovely shape were the result of thoughtful and gentle work. Oh please feel it: I am the croissant that felt its own heat and curves and wished to become a woman, and I am that woman from the wish. Let me be your morning treat with your coffee. Disregard the fear that I am too rich to be an ordinary meal. Allow my antique decadence into your morning into your mouth. Pair me with jam. Treasure me for my layers and layers of fragility and richness. Name me after a shape that the moon makes. Have me in a hotel while you are on vacation. Look at me and say, “Oh, I really shouldn’t,” just because you want to have me so very much.

I watch the pod whisper to men that if they really pull it out, it will pull off their penises. I am just one woman pulling an ancient cultural root out of her spirit, and I am not a doctor or a shaman, but I can say, just as a citizen and an ally, that nothing will happen to your penis if you stop being a misogynist. It will still be the same penis. Maybe if you stop listening to the insidious whisper of a centuries-old pod, you will have less stress about your penis, though? Just a theory but I’d actually bet money on it.

the light shines on me just as it does on the leaves and that even though I came here to try to do the art that I want and I want to be seen and held safe by my world, truly, in my primary wish for experience, I am asking for nothing more than a kinship with the atmosphere.

Inside the cotton-cups my nipples press like bright coins against the boundaries of the bags because they want to be out and on a beach and not in bags, and they would gladly pay to be set free, but I can’t give any money toward freedom because my money is for the Restaurant tonight.

If there is an animal to hold and soothe or just smooth the fur, do that. Turn your head to the side and give yourself a little kiss on the shoulder. Wash your face and hands. Put on an outfit of all one color. Only do a little gossip and make sure it doesn’t make any dents in anyone.

I love the house, and every time I go out into the world and get my heart busted up, I retreat back to the old ghostly house in Milton, hoping to become myself again, and to have one more chance, just one more chance to share my heart, and to share it successfully enough that if I become a ghost one day there's at least another ghost right beside me.

I am tired of sinking down to a lower place to be with men. I am tired of throwing a tarp over some of my personality so that the shape of my identity suits some gross man a little better, for whatever shitty things he needs to do in order to keep his boring identity erect and supreme. I have many grievances and no place to set them down, and I am cranky from having to shoulder this burden of reactions, like I am a fucking Ox that should carry your unsellable wares. I am tired of buying my own flowers. I am tired of having to hold my breath through Valentine's Day the way you do when you drive past a graveyard. I want a valentine from a normal person who is horny. I want a prize for how well I can love. I want to be a prize for love.

Your heart is factually a part of the universe, which is a miracle of endless force and boundless beauty. There is literally no way that you are not part of that. Despair can force you to turn your eyes away from this fact, but it is the real truth and it will be waiting to be with you when you are free enough to turn back to it. Your heart is a planet. I can see that you are from the sky.

I was born happy but when anything that is large, alive, and wild gets hurt and confused, I feel so sad, and I notice that I wish I could nurse big scared things. And it is worth mentioning that “big scared thing” is one way to describe how my heart often feels. My heart can feel like an elephant who is feeling dread and has an exceptional memory and naturally possesses something valuable that might be hunted, poached, wasted.

And then I take a little brush and I slick black paint over each eyelash and then I take a hot metal stick and wind my head-hairs around it so that everything is spirals. I stuff each breast into a cotton cup-bag, and the bags are sewn together as a pair of bags for boobs, and the pair of boob-bags is held on by straps because I guess this helps the boobs from not floating past the mountains and white puffs and into outer space?

It’s gross. Why are so many men so gross but still we say that they are heroes? And if we try to even talk about it with these men, they get incredibly upset and defensive and call us cruel or insecure, but really, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t do the thing but then not want to ever discuss it. If you want to hide it, maybe it’s not just because “it is private” but because you know, you really do know, that it is gross.

But even when I write about how frightened I used to be, I still feel very sensitive about it. I still feel ashamed. And in a way, that is so sad! It is sad that we are able to be so frightened or hurt by other people from before, and then we arrive to whatever is "now" and we flinch because we are still conditioned to anticipate being hurt. And then, that is when we act out. And after that is usually when we become ashamed. It is difficult work to break that cycle.

It occurs to me as I fight so hard with myself that these cruel and persistent voices are the echoes of trauma from the times when people treated me like I am now treating myself. And that, perhaps, it is possible to close an inner door and shut out voices that are not mine. In the last light of a long day, I sit on a chair on my porch and watch the sky drain colors down and out and I realize I want to hear my voice and only mine. Not the voice of my voice within a cacophony of old pains. Just mine, now.

I died seven years after you did—you went before, because that is the statistic that I know. I died knowing that that was the statistic, but still unsteady, wobbling on the unbelievable truth that you had left me. And you'd gone just when I was really about to become someone that needed a hand on me, not just to go down a stair but also to be on my soft old skin, to calm the hum of my bones that vibrated too roughly for such an elderly frame, because you know me, I just had so much energy that it was both a power and liability.

They split the couples up and they do it on purpose, which means that they force us, which is a deranged thing to do to people at a party, to force them. That in itself is wrong, Doctor! Hold on for one moment, because I think I have to put the computer down because I can feel that feeling that you have before a piece of the skull caves in and the thoughts shoot out of the brain in a lasso of fire, drawing in whatever offends, drawing in the concept and holding it close so that I can char it and just char it all the way to powder.

But in the waking world, even if your best friend birthed their baby in a bed right next to you, even if you have a partner who would do anything for you and they are holding your hand, they still cannot be your body. And they still cannot be inside of you. Only the lifeform is inside of you, and it has to come out, and there is an essential aloneness in that task that cannot be reconfigured. And this is not necessarily a bad thing even while being a frightening thing, and it must be met, and is living in my dreams, and is also real.

This man decides that indeed I am the one to love and so he travels to where I live. He travels far, directly to my front door, thinking of me the whole time that he is moving across the country and across the sky. He thinks of me as he puts on his clothes, as he buys coffee in the airport, thinking, “It doesn’t feel normal to buy coffee before something so huge! It feels like I should be buying a cloud or a star. I can’t believe I’m in normal life but also, I hope, about to begin this huge love. Maybe one day I will tell her about this experience.

Instead of asking the old questions like "What is wrong with me?" I would start asking important questions like "What if I only dreamed gardens, what if I ate carrots because what if I were a pleasant rabbit? What if I got a crown for doing nothing but being who I am, what if even just one plant said hi to me or a tree bashfully bowed as I walked by, what if my dog knew what I meant when I wave to him? What if I could always be a little bit on this island in my mind? What if I could always be a little bit naked, a little bit kissing everything, an unplundered trove of my own love?

It seemed cruel to me that we patiently live through periods of anguish and shock when we lose our family members, and we keep facing it, believing that activity and time will settle it all down for us. We make a deal with fate: I'll keep this flame that signifies the one you took. I will let it scorch me in my heart if you let it die down naturally, and eventually there will just be a scar on my heart, and I will always know what I have lost. But by then, I will feel only the emptiness, not the terrible scald. I will let the fire of the loss run its course. This is the debt I will pay so that I can have a more bearable sadness.

Something bad will happen to prove that you are not lovable, but because you are not lovable you will not be told the truth about the betrayal. The only use that people can comprehend for you is that you are some sort of anchor, some sort ofdead weight made out of a material that gives people cancer, I bet. And you will be lied to in all of the ways that lies can occur: by omission, to your face, because it is just easier to leave things out, 'for your own good, or on purpose because you deserve it by being such a weak drip. And you will see evidence of how much you truly suck, because when you start sniffing around for lies, you will make people angry, and they will say that nothing is wrong and you are making a fine situation into a bad one, and this is such a waste, and you are a disappointment, and why would a person do something like this?

To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one. Unlike the libertarian blank slate that appeals to outer space, or even the communes that sought to break with historical time, this “other world” is not a rejection of the one we live in. Rather, it is a perfect image of this world when justice has been realized with and for everyone and everything that is already here. To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails.

We make a deal with fate: I’ll keep this flame that signifies the one you took. I will let it scorch me in my heart if you let it die down naturally, and eventually there will just be a scar on my heart, and I will always know what I have lost. But by then, I will feel only the emptiness, not the terrible scald. I will let the fire of the loss run its course. This is the debt I will pay so that I can have a more bearable sadness. If you were looking at us from somewhere else, looking at the humans, you would notice that there is no way for us to have our loves without breathtaking pain, not because we love brutally but because we lose each other at different times. We don’t get to end together as one. You might take note of what those who remain are like when they are left on earth, conscripted into a long and terrible process of mending their hearts. If you are looking at us from somewhere else, this group of humans in mourning must be apparent, like how you see the cities with their nighttime lights when you look at us from outer space. You might see the light of the flames in all the hearts, those painful flames that go on and on for months and years.

I am so tuned to being alive that if you touch me it makes music.

I was born into a world where many men want to oppress all of the women with violence and laws and you or I can’t say anything else anymore without also admitting that.

There are arrows of extra electricity ripping through the air, loud drum noises in the sky when two opposite temperatures collide, deep wide dents filled with water and populated by animals that have scales or blowholes or no eyes or live in shells that look like tiny hard purses made out of little plates. There are white puffs floating in the air here; they float high above my house. The puffs turn into wet water-bloops and fall down and turn my hair from straight to curly. The water-bloops also make the flowers open up, they turn dust to mudslides, they intercept a sunbeam and make an arch that you can’t touch because it is made of swoops of colored light.

I was born happy but when anything that is large, alive and wild gets hurt and confused, I feel so sad. “big scared thing” is one way to describe how my heart often feels.

Sometimes there is something mean living in me and this mean thing gets a sick pleasure from harsh punishment and frightening imagery about who I am or what I should do.

I could not identify what was worthy and what was not. I didn’t know how or why to give myself small pleasures. "I am not one of the creatures who will experience anything precious." Trench-times were shallow, heavy, and mean. I couldn’t get into the actual morning because i was stuck underneath the weight of my days.

I see it. I know it. That nature makes art and I am a creation and I make things. This is an expansive fact that I could never measure, and it calms me. (...) Everything is art and nature and so are you.

I have been trying to destroy myself and I don’t want to anymore.

... but completeness was never a prize, in my eyes. Connection always was, deepening, tending, asking, cycling through.

It is certainly a point of pride that I functionally dwell in the realms that I was once afraid of. The darks and the inbetweens. They all fortify me. I am a citizen of many dimensions, and now I slip between them easily. I never slip away from myself by simplifying myself. I can’t become smaller to fit into a crouching love in somebody else’s meager world. (...) I am not a wandering spirit, I am a walking woman.

I’m stuck here in a cycle and I am getting older but I am not growing up and my heart is getting soft dark spots on it like a fruit that has gone bad or is soft because too many hands have squeezed it

It says, Women are property. Men decide what women can do with their bodies. Men own women. We are all seperate and must stay devided. Women are beneath, less than, but also, watch out for them, really do watch out! But act like you are not "watching out" or scared - act like a good guy who is protecting the holy object. It says, Act like you are innocent. It suggests, Tell them they are crazy.

And that, perhaps, it is possible to close an inner door and shut out voices that are not mine. In the last light of a long day, I sit on a chair on my porch and watch the sky drain colors down and out and I realize I want to hear my voice and only mine. Not the voice of my voice within a cacophony of old pains. Just mine, now.

I was born as sweet as that and if I am too sweet for your tastes then just clamp your mouth shut and spin on your heels. I can't add sourness to my sap anymore just to fit onto a menu in a restaurant for wimps.

The structure of what I wish for and the images that usually come together for me to be happy have to change now. But what am I supposed to do with all of the parts of my heart that are only there to be given?

I knew that my warmth and lovely shape were the result of thoughtful and gentle work. Oh please feel it: I am the croissant that felt its own heat and curves and wished to become a woman, and I am that woman from the wish.

was born with a fatal allergy to both subtext and traditional organization techniques and I will tell you I have really had a few near-death experiences.

After a while you understand that you can create and raise the child, but the spirit…the spirit comes from the universe.

My physical heart feels so exposed, so shallowly planted it feels like it is in my mouth. I can't tell if I'm spitting it out or swallowing it. I can't tell if I'm going to chomp it into bits just by trying to be here.

It has come to our attention that you recently created a dream in which you were waiting in line for a sandwich, and that this was the whole dream.

I am supposed to be touched. I can't wait to find the person who will come into my kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?

and I guess it made the man feel so scared and defensive that all he could do was to appropriate my whole experience as his and then accuse me of starting the problem.

I comforted myself, in pieces.

He started to ask tense, defensive questions to which the answer was clearly supposed to be “No, no, the problem is not you, it’s other worse men who do crimes and things like that,” even though it was him and it is probably all of us.

I watch the pod whisper to men that if they really pull it out, it will pull off their penises.

As we grow more confident in your ability to not secretly shit on yourself all the time, we shall expand the list. Our hope is that one day, you will not need this list at all, and will be able to speak freely and without the secret sibling of self-abuse and shaming.

It occurs to me, even as I’m not sure what’s left of me, that I can use what is still alive to really behave in a way that I admire. It occurs to me that I can have every single feeling I need to have without ever trying to overpower someone or win something.

It occurs to me that I just never want to argue with a single person ever again and I will do anything I can to prevent it. Will I discuss? Yes. And will I disagree? Yes, I will also do that. I will also most likely feel classic lava-flows of anger.

I was born in a hatbox on a train in the past, when there were dining cars and menus and bud vases and chaperones and dandies.

I was born in a Shirley Temple, and I came out with the stem of the cherry in my small, strong new hand and I walked that cherry like a dog. I was born ready to care for a pet and be a pet too.

I was born in the day, right before lunchtime, and I arrived with a full appetite and it hasn’t settled down at all.

I was born two years ago when one of my friends described me as “the least able-to-be-controlled person that I know,” and I started living right away.

I am afraid of a ghost that is mine. It reflects my will to be wild, my inclination to plant roots, my hunger for treats, my fear that straying too far from the pack is what I must do but perhaps at a large cost.

Good, gentle civility and loving self-discipline are essential.

Why should I have to sleep alone? What is wrong with me? What happened to my allure, which in my last decade seemed almost problematic?

I thought the separation was one from other people, but of course, the call was coming from inside the house, as they say.

Your feelings of joy are not fake if you are having them!

I’m stuck here in a cycle and I am getting older but I am not growing up and my heart is getting soft dark spots on it like a fruit that has gone bad or is soft because too many hands have squeezed it but then put it back down not because I am not ready but because they were not ready for my type of fruity flesh. I felt so ripe and sweet—what was off?

Please come close enough so that I can see you, and then I will try to do the rest for both of us, because I have not learned my lesson yet and do not possess the faith to believe in the partner who does his side of the thing. But I would love it if you would, because that would be dreamy and then I would also have that faith.

It doesn’t matter. It’s fake. But the feelings that you will have when you think of the thing will be real feelings.

Then I admired myself. What’s more, I felt tenderness about my personality and my choices for delight.

these cruel and persistent voices are the echoes of trauma from the times when people treated me like I am now treating myself. And that, perhaps, it is possible to close an inner door and shut out voices that are not mine.

I am the tender stem. Who is the sun who will return every day just to make sure I open up, and who will give me my own dark evening to close and just be within?

Here you are now. Nothing that happens now or after will count as much as anything you’ve done before.

I sit here and I turn around to face the air coming through the window, and the air is so warm that I take it as a sign that it is all right to be alive as I am, just as I am, and to keep trying.

and I feel my heart break down even more and I say, Good, let it fall away, and look, look, everything is always remaking itself and so are you. Everything is art and nature and so are you.