Jessica Simpson Quotes

Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it's tuna, but it says 'Chicken by the Sea.

Twenty-three is old. It's almost 25, which is like almost mid-20s.

Platypus? I thought it was pronounced platymapus. Has it always been pronounced platypus?

Sometimes we are all so afraid to be honest with ourselves because we know that honesty will lead to somewhere.” I wrote this ten years ago. “Can fear walk us to something better?

Did he repeatedly stab me in the heart, or did I just keep running into the knife he aimed at me?

Dumb is just not knowing. 'Ditzy' is having the courage to ask!

At school my boobs were bigger than all my friends' and I was afraid to show them. Now I feel like they make my outfits look better. They're like an accessory.

laugh a lot. It burns a lot of calories.

There are so many firsts to raising kids, and parents are told to catch them all. But they don’t warn you about the lasts. The last baby onesie. The last time you tie their shoes. The last time they think you have every answer in the world.

It didn’t make me cry, it made me mad. But he was breaking down in front of the world, and, again, I felt responsible. How many times are women made to feel responsible for the actions of men? I know now that

Whatever you are going through, the sun will come out.

All of us are so much more alike than we want to accept.

The look I was going for was sexy but saved. Come hither but leave room for the Lord.

That’s the power of faith in action. It’s not about talking and judging. It’s about doing.

And LO and BEHOLD, I was on BOTH the six AND eleven o’clock newscasts! AND all the commercials, as well! (‘Day of the drag queen at one area high school, controversy at six!’) And it must have been a slow night because I was the SECOND PIECE of the night! The granny suicide bomber got the lead. BITCH! But I managed to beat out the president’s pulled groin and day six of the Jessica Simpson chapped-lip crisis!

How can I be my best if I never fail, and how can I ever find peace if I never yell.

Pour your scotch on the rocks and drink your misery down. Go home and make love to her and picture me, picture me. Yeah, picture me!

But then I remind myself that life is really just about one moment at a time. To not think about two years from now, but to think about right now. Two years from now will figure itself out.

I do like the romance of the hard stuff in life.

I was like a lot of women who get their wish: I loved being a mom, I just didn't love being me.

It is so easy to notice things about people and tell them. I don't know why people don't just give out compliments every single day.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” It’s a quote from Joseph Campbell, who studied mythology to describe what it takes to be a hero. I probably got it from one of the many, many self-help books I devoured back then, underlining points and dog-earing the pages that seemed to tell me a way out. I repeated that quote to myself for weeks, in the shower, on a red carpet, driving in my car. There was a life waiting for me, I told myself. I owed it to the people in it to be brave.

She had mailed them a few days before she died, wishing everyone a great future. It was a powerful lesson in creating a legacy by choosing your words with intention. We are on this earth such a short time, cruelly short in Sarah’s case. What message did I want to leave behind?

Hi, I’m Gale Norton,” she said. “Welcome to the White House.” “I’m Jessica,” I said, shaking her hand. I made a stab at small talk. “And what do you do?” “I’m the secretary of the interior,” she said. “Oh my gosh,” I said, waving my arm high to take in the room. “I love what you’ve done with the place. Everything is beautiful.” My dad pinched my arm, and she just walked away. I was trying to be nice and give a compliment, but that’s her Jessica Simpson story. Now I know the secretary of the interior manages federal land and national parks. Believe me, I beat myself up so much over that one that I could ace a test on it. At least I’d made it to the White House again. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

Give a girl an insult, she'll feel bad for a day, but teach a girl to hate her body and she'll feel bad forever.

I think there's a difference between ditzy and dumb. Dumb is just not knowing. Ditzy is having the courage to ask.

Who was I if I had no one to blame for my life but myself?

copy: “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.

I wanted to see who I was, without using another person’s love for me as a measurement of my value.

Remember what the fashion big mouths were saying about Jessica Simpson? Looking at her magazine pictures, sucking their teeth, going, "Oh, look at her in her 'mom jeans.'" Know what? That is an unnecessarily cheap shot at her and kinda lousy to moms at the same time. Who the hell are they to say that? What gratification does it give them to be mean at someone's expense? People made nasty comments like that about President Obama. They made an issue of his jeans when he threw out the first ball at the All-Star game in St. Louis. Why? Who was he bothering? Come on. The tabloids, celebrity mags, and TV entertainment shows do fashion critiques all the time. But it's not about fashion, it's about trashin'. Their specialty is "Celebrity Cellulite!"--running unflattering pictures of stars at the beach and saying who should give up the bikini and go for the one-piece. And this is acceptable? This is a mark of journalism in a civil society, to take ambush pictures of people at the beach? And if the camera was turned around and pointed the other way, what would that look like?

Still, I was present. I kept a promise I made to myself a little over a year before to show up in my own life. To feel things, whether they were the result of bad memories, or good ones in the making.

Let’s just promise to be there for one another in our imminent and enduring times of trouble and thunder.” “Deal,” I said. He always talked like that. I would moon over him to CaCee, using that same lofty language.

I also hope to be your friend. I am going to need you to hold my hand through some memories, and there may be times that I’ll end up holding yours as we confront similar things that scare us. I’ve come to recognize fear when I see it. It may show itself in different ways, but it’s a familiar face, isn’t it? I have a different relationship to fear now. I’ve learned that we grow from walking through it, and a lot of people don’t even know they have that option. You either conquer it, or you let it destroy you. So, let’s do this together.

Press pause for a second on your life and ask yourself, What is my calling? What makes you feel passionate? If you don’t immediately have an answer, try broadening beyond something specific. My mom’s was specific—fashion—but mine was more broad. I like making people feel good. Whether I am doing that through music, which came naturally to me, or through writing, which is harder on me but brings a different reward, I’m driven by the same impulse. I think sometimes we get so caught up in the vessel of the work rather than what matters: the spirit that fills it.

The kids are asleep, and my husband is reading in the other room. So, it’s just you and me. Every night after we put our children to bed, I come down here to the study to write. It’s cold here in Los Angeles, so bedtimes have been creeping later. My daughter Maxwell is six now and my son Ace is five, and they have the kind of energy that

My husband, Eric, has a joke he likes to say: “Ask Jessica to sing about Jesus or America, and she’ll be there. Super Bowl, backyard cookout, whatever you got, she’s coming to sing ‘God Bless America.’ ” And he’s right. Growing up in Texas, I sang that song over and over. From Memorial Day parades to Veteran’s Day pancake breakfasts—I was your girl. When I sang it at the East Room of the White House, I finally found out I had been flubbing the lyrics all those years. I was there to kick off the USO holiday tour for troops fighting in Afghanistan. It was the first time they let celebrities in after 9/11, because, well, they were busy. It was surreal to hear President Bush speak, thanking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for his service, the transportation secretary for keeping the airlines safe. And then he added, “I want to thank Rob Schneider and Jessica Simpson as well.” They asked me to sing “God Bless America,” and I gave it my all. President Bush was in the front row, right next to Laura, and I watched him quietly sing along, his mouth moving along with mine. Something went wrong after we got to the mountains, though. I said, “to the rivers,” just like I always did, and, well, he knew it was “the prairies.” I was so embarrassed that I apologized to him and Mrs. Bush after. “I swear all this time I thought it was rivers!” I said. “That’s okay, Jessica,” he said. “God blessed the rivers, too.

Smile bigger.” Now I know how to get through photo shoots, because I know every angle they need. I do this super weird thing for my friends where I just slightly move my face to do a speed round of each red carpet pose and photo shoot I’ve done. The big smile, eyes up and then down, the Mona Lisa, the chin-down-lips-parted, the “Oh hi!” . . . My friends scream because I look like a robot model shorting out. But let me tell you, it makes it easy on the photographers.

But remember 2003, though, when girls wore those miniskirts that were like six floaty napkins stapled to a scrunchie, with perhaps an Edwardian waistcoat sewn of cobwebs as a top? Where at any moment a baby’s sneeze across campus might expose Kaylee’s entire bunghole and even the slouchy Western belt she wore over her three layers of different-colored camisoles couldn’t save her? In case you’ve repressed the memory, 2003 was the kind of year where Jessica Simpson might wear rubber flip-flops to the Golden Globes, and Nicole Richie was nearly elected president on a platform of “straight blonde hair on top, long curly dark brown extensions underneath, one feather.” The 2003 vibe—culturally, socially, politically, spiritually—was very “energy drink commercial directed by Mark McGrath, and not Mark McGrath in his prime, either.” Millions of Americans were forced to mourn Mr. Rogers while wearing a hot-pink corduroy train conductor’s hat. Never again! Bad Boys II is a 2003 movie.

had these two babies, and I was trying to catch all these firsts and savor every second. I wanted to still be intimate with my husband as my system tried to reset itself—and once the hormones stopped fluctuating, I had no idea what that would even look like. Even with the children outside my body, we were still so strongly connected that their emotions and needs crowded out mine. Was I anxious because of something I was feeling, or was I picking up on Maxwell’s distress about not having a need met in that one second because I was trying to breastfeed her brother? Where did I end and begin? Did it even matter?

The fact is that I have kept journals since I was fifteen. I started the year my cousin Sarah was killed in an accident. Two years and three days older than me, she was like a sister to me. Sarah left behind a ton of journals, listing off the people she was praying for. When I read her journals, I saw that she had prayed for me. Every day. I inherited her purpose, and I still feel a need to see through what she had started in so many ways. As I wrote about situations in my life and the people I was praying for, the journals became a safe place for me to talk through things without putting any pressure on anybody

To get to this point, to talking to you right here in this moment, I had to really feel. And I hadn’t been doing that. Up until a few years ago, I had been a feelings addict. Love, loss—whichever, whatever, as long as it was epic. I just needed enough noise to distract me from the pain I had been avoiding since childhood. The demons of traumatic abuse that refused to let me sleep at night—Tylenol PM at age twelve, red wine and Ambien as a grown, scared woman. Those same demons who perched on my shoulder, and when they saw a man as dark as them, leaned in to my ear to whisper, “Just give him all your light. See if it saves him. . . .

I couldn’t hide my sadness in Waco. Partly because the holidays always made me miss Sarah, especially when I was with her brother and parents. But I was also starting to feel detached from my real life, and seeing my extended family perform for the cameras made me realize how much I was playing a part. Nowadays, I see so many people performing their identities on social media, but I feel like I was a guinea pig for that. How was I supposed to live a real, healthy life filtered through the lens of a reality show? If my personal life was my work, and my work required me to play a certain role, who even was I anymore? I had no idea who I really was.

I know he accused Nick of making me dependent on him for everything, which is the pot calling up the kettle to have a long talk about being black. My mom loved Nick, but right or wrong, my parents had spent my life making me think that I couldn’t do anything without them. At twenty-one years old, I was still very much a child. I didn’t know how to write a check, but, somehow, I was paying for everything. I knew that I was making money, but I didn’t think of myself as the family breadwinner. I just thought my money was their money. Honestly, what I knew for sure was that it stopped my family from having as many fights, so I felt lucky that I could be the one to help keep the peace.

My great-grandmother read people’s fortunes and aligned her gardens with the stars. This was always said before a long, dramatic pause. Nana never wanted to talk about her. If I said anything about astrology or being a Cancer, my grandmother would go move quick to hush me. I heard different stories about my great-grandmother, cautionary tales about what could happen if you leaned in hard on that intuition. I don’t know the full story, but I also know that she was a card reader in Waco, Texas, at a time when that was not done. She was considered crazy by a lot of people in town. That buckle on the Bible Belt can come down hard and leave a mark. But I’d stare in the mirror at my brown eyes and high cheekbones, convinced I was Native American. More than that, we Simpson girls, my mother included, all seemed a little witchy. A nicer word would be intuitive. We had a good sense of people from the get-go and we often knew what was going to happen before it happened. Sometimes we chalked it up to our faith that God would provide, sometimes to just paying attention. But often it felt like we knew what was destined to be. Everything that happened in my life just felt preordained. Still does.

My stutter started soon after, and the doctors said it was from the head injury. My mom said that when I stuttered it looked like my brain and I were trying to say ten things at once. My voice just wouldn’t work. “You can’t focus on the one idea you need to talk about,” she told me. “Just say the one thing, Jess.” She is the youngest of three—the Drew girls of McGregor, Texas—and her middle sister Connie was a speech therapist. Aunt Connie advised her to get me to calm down. “Take a breath,” my mother would say, getting down to my level to look me in the eye. That only worked so well. If you want someone to calm down, try telling them “calm down” and see where it gets you. But Connie had another idea, something that worked with other people who stuttered. Singing. “What you’re trying to say,” Mom said to me one day, “sing it to me.” I turned the phrase over in my mind, smoothing the edges of its consonants and vowels until the words became the breaths of a song. A lyric I could control. “I want Cheeeeeeri-ohhhhs,” I sang. I can’t describe that release. The rush of simply being understood. “Yes, you can have Cheerios,” my mother yelled. “You can have whatever you want! You sound so beautiful.” For the next two years, singing was the only time I didn’t stutter. I sang for everything I wanted, like some Disney princess making a wish. Around four, the stutter became more pronounced and my parents took me to a therapist. He used art therapy and asked me to draw myself in the family. I drew my parents standing in front of our house, then put myself inside looking out from a window. He told my parents I had a fear of abandonment. Looking back, I know my parents never left me alone, and maybe I was even around them too much. But somehow, I still had a fear that they would leave me.

There was a rodeo going on in McGregor, and there was a horse named Gracious Will, likely getting its name from the eleventh chapter of Matthew. Jesus marvels to God that children like Sarah can see what matters in life better than the supposedly wise. “Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.” Gracious Will did not perform well that day, and the kid in charge of the horse was angry. So angry he hit the animal, and so hard the horse took off running. The horse made it to the highway, narrowly missing two cars as it galloped against traffic. It stopped and stood in a ditch on the side of the road. As the pickup was about to pass, the horse suddenly leaped in front of it, going through the windshield and landing on top of Sarah.

Waiting for my life to really begin, I underlined a passage in chapter 29 of my paperback copy: “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” That quote has stayed with me. Sometimes through the years, it was about a man who I wished could love me as much as I loved him. But more often it was about my determination to make good on the expectations placed on me. By God, by my parents, by me. No matter what.

That my husband stopped drinking with me was powerfully romantic, even if Hallmark doesn’t have a card for it. Or maybe they do. It saved our marriage, or at least saved us from the stupid fights that didn’t need to happen. Things said that didn’t deserve to be said because it was the alcohol talking, not the heart.

The ambulance came, and they all followed it to the hospital. Sarah was pronounced dead when she got there. She was gone. I know there are families who have had tragedies. But we were always somehow spared. There’s a comfort you slip into as good Christians. God’s got his angels over me, you think. I was taught—and generations before me believed—that we were protected. Without that blind faith, what did we have? Mom and I got on the next flight home. I was in shock, I realize now, thinking if we did everything right, we would somehow undo the reality. Maybe like Aunt Debbie’s prayers. I thought we would go up in the air and then touch down on a world where this hadn’t happened. Going through the clouds, I put my head down on my mother’s lap. I don’t know if I fell asleep, but I had a dream that I had fallen asleep, if that makes sense. Whether it was a dream or a vision, Sarah came to me. She had her long curly hair again. She had gotten her hair cut shorter a few weeks before and told me she hated it. But there it was. “I’m okay,” she said, giving me that smile she gave me every time she gently shook her head and told me to relax. “Please tell my mom I’m okay. Please give her a hug for me.” Mom stroked my hair, and I sat up. “Sarah just came to me in a dream,” I told her, adding what she’d said about her mom. “Well, you should let Aunt Debbie know,” she said. “She needs to hear that.

When we arrived at Aunt Debbie’s house, she asked my dad if he would do the service. “Of course,” he said. She had been reading through Sarah’s journals and shared them with my parents. I didn’t even know Sarah kept diaries. They were so moving that my father asked permission to take them home to pull things from them for the service. He wove together passages of her writing, along with scripture and songs of praise that she highlighted. He told me how mature she was for her age, and how much she trusted God’s will. Her last entry was about her upcoming graduation, and she wrote that it was not nearly as important as her faith. “Since I know God and Jesus,” she wrote, “when I die, I will graduate.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I don’t think Nick could either. In countless interviews, people asked him in front of me if he was jealous. “Her success is my success,” he said again and again, so convincingly that even I almost believed him.

I just feel like I’m going through so many changes,” I said to Johnny one night over scotch. “It’s hard.” “Nah, change is easy,” he said. “Staying the same is a lot harder on you.

But to me, an emotional affair was worse than a physical one. It’s funny, I know, because I had placed such an emphasis on sex by not having it before marriage. After I actually had sex, I understood that the emotional part was what mattered. And Johnny and I had that, which seemed far more of a betrayal to my marriage than sex.

Ten years older than me, he spoke of writers who inspired him, like Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, and how they brought a spirit of adventure to everything they did. It was something he emulated. Nothing was ever average with him. It had to be the best night of your life, or it wasn’t worth doing. This wasn’t a performance. He made me feel that spirit of adventure as he asked me about my life. Not just my present, but about who I wanted to be. I could share the deepest authentic thoughts with him, and he didn’t roll his eyes at me. He actually liked that I was smart and embraced my vulnerabilities. He didn’t make fun of me, he laughed with me. He believed in me and made me feel like I could do anything. And the only person who had ever made me feel that way was my dad. Certainly not my husband. We were open about the challenges of our marriages and why we felt we had to honor those vows by sticking with the marriage. He had a daughter, and he spoke of her like his life began and ended with her. I had never seen someone’s eyes shine like his did when he talked about his child.

I held Boke when they gave her anesthesia and stroked her head as she slipped off to sleep. I thought I’d leave, but Dr. Magee invited me to stay. I watched, wanting to be a witness to this miracle. It took what, forty-five minutes? And it would change Boke’s life forever. And mine, too. I had come to Kenya thinking I would be blessing these kids with good works, and I was the one being blessed. When it was over, Dr. Magee said he was impressed I didn’t flinch once. It was one of the best reviews I’ve ever received. I went with Boke to recovery so that I would be the first person she saw when she woke up. I sat cradling her and marveling that you could already see the transformation of her mouth being made whole. I held her in the crook of my right arm, and in her postoperation sleep, she wrapped her little hand around my left index finger. When she was fully awake, someone went to get her mom to tell her that the surgery was a success. She came in, and we smiled at each other. She had no idea who I was and wanted nothing from me but to step in when she was in need. I hugged her, thinking how scared she must have been. The doctors worked all day, so I stayed late and did the same the next day. When it was over, Ken and I were exhausted, and I could not stop thanking him for getting me involved in Operation Smile. It gave me perspective on what mattered. I hadn’t planned on doing so much soul searching, but being so far away gave me an opportunity to look inward in stillness.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” It’s a quote from Joseph Campbell, who studied mythology to describe what it takes to be a hero. I probably got it from one of the many, many self-help books I devoured back then, underlining points and dog-earing the pages that seemed to tell me a way out. I repeated that quote to myself for weeks, in the shower, on a red carpet, driving in my car.

He started to cry, and in that moment, I left my body for a second and just saw the scene. Nick in tears, and this girl keeping a poker face like a hostage eyeing the door. Jessica, you should cry, I told myself. I thought it would make him feel better. I couldn’t. I’d been living with sadness so long that I was used to the feeling. “Please

When I love you, I want you to stick around.

Price of Beauty,

Isabelle Caro.

San Ysidro Ranch and

Jessica Simpson

Whatever you are going through, the sun will come.

I occupied my time trying and failing to be the woman the men in my life wanted me to be.

situation is yours to deal with,” he said. “I’m just playing off whatever you give me.

I couldn’t work a washing machine to save my life.

Fear will keep us at a standstill, going nowhere fast.

When you quiet your mind, do you feel more anxious than ever, or are you empowered by your own strength?

We have to confront each demon, truly feel the emotions brought up and trace how they’ve wired our daily thoughts, judgments, and actions. Make friends with the things that scare us, but take away their power.

Because even pain is truth, and the truth always comes out.

To lead ourselves into something greater than yesterday, we have to let go of it.

I have belittled myself for far too much of my existence, fearing the regret of my own decisions. Only I can allow myself to move—no longer paralyzed, pretending that I can’t.

So, this year I am focusing on letting go of my fears—big and small, one by one—to get where I need to go. If I want to lead myself into something greater than yesterday, I have to surrender the things that scare me and hold me back.

There’s enough pressure keeping this perfect little creature alive. Just do the best you can, whatever your best is.

Each time you deny your own truth, something intense happens. You have to listen to the signs and take care of it yourself.

So, I went through the motions and got the photos, like every mom does on special occasions. Just get the damn photo so we can create the memory. Then I can go back to real life. Then I could go back inside and hide.

Listen. You better stop treating me like I’m Jessica Simpson and I don’t know the difference between tuna and chicken…of the sea… Circa 2003.

I held myself to an insane standard, and while I beat myself up about always falling short, I definitely held it against the people who I thought weren’t trying.

This light walked into my life, and I remember the moment I realized I didn’t have to give him my light. We could share it and make things brighter for everybody.

We found out early that we were having a girl, and I was thrilled. My wish had come true. When I was pregnant with Maxwell, every sad thing in my life was forgotten or put into a healthy perspective. I know that was so much to put on her, but I couldn’t help it. She saved me from all the worries, all the overthinking, all the dwelling on the past.

When people saw the real me, they wanted me to succeed. It was a fleeting thought, and I wish I had caught it and internalized it. I still thought people expected perfection.

Now I know the secretary of the interior manages federal land and national parks.

You gave her that nod,” I said. “Like you knew her.” “I nodded?” he said. “Jesus, Jess.

It was self-sabotage.

Still, I prayed that God would send me someone who longed for love like I did.

I’m going to Jessica Simpson Business School.

So many things had to happen for our paths to cross—not just that first night—but in the thirty years we spent preparing ourselves for each other.

And for their incredible scholarship and friendship, my thanks to: Andrea Ballestero, Lauren Berlant, Alex Blanchette, David Bond, John Borneman, Ella Butler, Summerson Carr, Molly Cunningham, Paul Edwards, Didier Fassin, Cassie Fennell, Elaine Gan, Stefanie Graeter, Hugh Gusterson, Orit Halprin, Isao Hashimoto, Gabrielle Hecht, Stefan Helmreich, John Jackson, Cory Kratz, Max Liboiron, Mark Maguire, Kai Mah, Kate Mariner, Andrew Mathews, Amy McLachlan, Greg Mello, Ned O’Gorman, Trevor Paglen, Juno Parrenas, Columba Peoples, Kareem Rabie, Laurence Ralph, Patrick Rivers, Michael Rossi, Nick Shapiro, Audra Simpson, Sverker Sorlin, Christian Tompkins, Anna Weichselbraun, Kaya Williams, and Jessica Winegar.

You know that one Jessica Simpson song?” “Don’t you dare bring 90’s pop into this,” I demanded. Again, I was absolutely not smiling. “Am I irresistible to you, Sanchez?

the only thing worth hiding from your man is receipts.

I liked Ryan Gosling

In my entire life, whenever someone asked me if I was okay, the answer was a reflex: “Yes.” Because, no matter what, I always wanted it to be true.

If I said anything about astrology or being a Cancer, my grandmother would go move quick to hush me.

A nicer word would be intuitive.

Anishanaabeg women hunted, trapped, fished, held leadership positions, and engaged in warfare as well as engaged in domestic affairs and looked after children. They were encouraged to show a broad range of emotions, and express their gender and sexuality in a way that was true to their own being, as a matter of both principle and survival. Anishinaabeg men hunted, trapped, fished, held leadership positions, engaged in warfare, and also knew how to cook, sew, and look after children. They were encouraged to show a broad range of emotions, and express their gender and sexuality in a way that was true to their own being, as a matter of both principle and survival. This is true for other genders as well. The degree to which individuals engaged in each of these activities depended on their name, clan, extended family, skill, interest, and most important, individual self-determination or agency. Agency was valued, honored, and respected, because it produced a diversity of highly self-sufficient individuals, families, and communities. This diversity of highly self-sufficient and self-determining people ensured survival and resilience that enabled the community to withstand difficult circumstances. Not Murdered and Not Missing: Rebelling against Colonial Gender Violence. March 15, 2014. Nations Rising. Thanks to Miigwech/Nia:wen/Mahsi Cho, Tara Williamson, Melody McKiver, Jessica Danforth, Glen Coulthard, and Jarrett Martineau.

Strong communities are born out of individuals being their best selves. Not Murdered and Not Missing: Rebelling against Colonial Gender Violence. March 15, 2014. Nations Rising. Thanks to Miigwech/Nia:wen/Mahsi Cho, Tara Williamson, Melody McKiver, Jessica Danforth, Glen Coulthard, and Jarrett Martineau.

She gave me a huge smile, and I took it so I could manage to give it back to her.

We need to own our weakness, our hurt, our pain, and say it out loud so that we can name what is coming up and why. You deserve it. You deserve to feel the heartbreak and the pain so that once and for all you stop holding yourself back from feeling whatever it is you’ve tried to mask. No, it’s not easy but you are worth the work.

I’VE GROWN INTO MYSELF to understand where I’m going and what I want to do. I always knew who I was but I didn’t know how to get to where I thought I needed to go in order to be “that person.” I think a lot of us are intimidated by what we are called to be, but we already have everything we need in our hearts.

I love journaling because I have found it to be a place of compassion for my mistakes and a challenge to learn from them. It reveals all the hidden places, and as you discover and move through them, you see that that’s where all the answers are.