Jonathan Van Ness Quotes

Just because we mess up doesn’t mean all the lessons we learned are undone. Healing can be imperfect.

As scary as this can be I want you to know no matter how broken you feel, and how seemingly unlikely it is, we are never too broken to heal.

Imperfection is beautiful. To anyone who has ever felt broken beyond repair, this is for you. If you’ve ever been excluded, or told you were not enough, know that you are enough, and beautifully complete.

Because when you have this much personality, there’s a fear lurking just below the surface: If you knew all of me, you wouldn’t love me anymore.

I got paralyzed by things. I’m pretty sure that ‘I hate uncertainty’ was my first full sentence as a baby.

You know those plants that are always trying to find the light? Maybe they were planted in a location that didn’t necessarily facilitate growth, but inexplicably they make a circuitous route to not only survive but bloom into a beautiful plant. That was me—my whole life.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that acceptance is the key to so much, and we find so much freedom in feeling fierce about what we’re accepting.

Being normal is being completely unique, because nobody’s the same. Normal, honey? Who is she, anyway?

There’s a rhyme and reason behind my effervescent spirit, and no, I did not wake up like this. It took a lot of trauma and tears to become the person you see today.

Letting go of that idea that I needed to be normal or that I somehow wasn’t normal just because I needed to prioritize self-care to be healthy is the biggest gift I’ve ever given myself. Being normal is being completely unique, because nobody’s the same.

There are endless sexy shapes, colors, forms, and kinds of people who deserve celebration. It’s each one of our jobs to reject that comparison of what we think beauty is and realize we are the motherfucking beauty.

Joy can live beside sorrow. Life is messy, unpredictable, and seldom tied into neat little boxes.

Comparing ourselves to people on social media is as risky as using WebMD to diagnose yourself. You’ll end up way more stressed than before - just don’t even go there.

Life is so much a daily exercise in learning to love yourself and forgive yourself, over and over.

You can’t be fiercely loving without also being passionate - and sometimes passionate isn’t pretty. What might seem testy is actually scar tissue, the residual effects of trauma that I lived through.

Our grief was leading us all towards Mexican food.

It wasn’t until I had lost everything I thought I wanted that I realized being an adult wasn’t about being ‘normal,’ or having a life that seems enviable to people from the outside. Being a fulfilled and successful adult has required accepting that I do have an inner child who was hurt and traumatized. It’s my job as an adult to nurture him, alongside all the other parts of me that make me who I am.

There are a million ways to reach recovery. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t find a way that works for you.

So I’m telling my story - the whole story - to show that some masterpieces start off a mess.

My default is to be really critical of myself, but the world will do that for me, so I gotta make sure I always know I have my back.

Joyful accomplishments exist next to painful memories. I found a lot of my healing when I realized that my suffering didn’t undo my joy.

Joy can live beside sorrow.

no matter how much my life changes I am enough, and I am loved in and of myself and by myself, I’ll be good.

We are all a beautiful jumble of layers, parts, and mixtures of experiences, but my most important part, and in my opinion everyone’s most valuable part, is the one that chooses self-love instead of self-harm in the grand sweeping ways but also the little ways every single day. Learning to parent yourself, with soothing compassionate love, forgiving yourself, and learning from all the decisions you made to get you to where you are - that’s the key to being fulfilled. Learning to be the dream parent cheerleader to yourself. It’s been in you the whole time. And no matter how down you get, you can always make a gorgeous recovery.

One thing I have come to notice in my life is that recovery for me has not been linear. It’s more two steps forward, three back, five forward, two back, so I’m always improving but there are setbacks within the improvement.

Cheering on a corrupt institutional body that’s super problematic with money and opportunity but we all pretend like it’s an equal playing field and celebrate it—what’s more American than that?

We were all just doing the best we could with what we knew, and I just didn’t know very much back then.

It’s not gonna be pretty, but it’s my truth, and if I don’t share it, I won’t be able to help others who are struggs to func.

I just wanna be fit and have good blood pressure and feel good with my clothes off and I do. I love my body but I think that there’s always a part of me that wishes I looked more like Antoni or like an underwear model. But then again, I still really love to binge eat at McDonald’s at night, so...you know.

I hope culturally we can continue to normalize the idea that being a survivor is so much more common than anyone realizes and we all deserve to be heard, but more importantly are deserving of a recovery full of love, laughter, and light.

the more you love and accept yourself, the less you need other people's approval.

At the end of the day, the people we let in our space affect our ability to get to where we want to go, so if they're in the way of realizing your potential, it's okay to disconnect because you must choose yourself.

My joy and my accomplishments existed, and so did the pain from my abuse. How can we feel one without the other? Joyful accomplishments exist next to painful memories. I found a lot of my healing when I realized my suffering didn't undo my joy.

Just like joy and pain coexist, so can discomfort and humor. Which is why you gotta buckle up buttercup, because I can go from comedy to tragedy in three seconds flat. And that’s not damaged or not normal. I hope culturally we can continue to normalize the idea that being a survivor is so much more common than anyone realizes and we all deserve to be heard, but more importantly are deserving of a recovery full of love, laughter, and light.

I live off coffee until 3 in the afternoon, and then try to be balanced, but the next thing I know I'm face down in a plate of garlic bread.

For all the times I've been hurt I did some hurting.

My worst nightmare had been realized, and I was still here.

Fake it till you make it and make it look graceful.

You try being an eight-year-old violin-playing gymnastics-obsessed geode-collecting stamp connoisseur who has to have all those things with him in order to feel safe and nurtured.

But still, I struggle with body images and then struggle with the fact that I’m still struggling with them — enough already!

Imperfection is beautiful. To anyone who has ever felt broken beyond repair, this is for you. If you’ve ever been excluded, or told you were not enough, know that you are enough, and beautifully complete.

It was a lesson for me. Even in my loneliest times, I knew I could go deep into my imagination and create a better reality for myself. And then that’s built into my life in so many other areas. Those little moments kept me expanding instead of shrinking into myself.

I had spent the first half of my twenties fighting to find the will to process everything that I’d survived in my childhood and adolescence. Having done the hard work, I was now in a chapter in my life where I had the clarity to pursue my dreams and passion and find some actual success.

I love straight people

other people's opinions are not a reflection of you, as long as your spirit is thriving.

you don't have to ride the elevator to the basement.

All I had to lose was the moment, and a moment is something that we should never let go to waste.

There was nobody to tell about that kind of shame and pain. So creating pockets of joy for myself was an art I learned early.

Fake it til you make it and make it look graceful.

If you knew all there was to know about me, you wouldn’t love me anymore,

I have come to learn, though, that the more you love and accept yourself, the less you need other people’s approval. I never want my childlike spirit, my desire to learn and entertain, to change.

Because when you have this much personality, there’s a fear lurking just below the surface: If you knew all of me, you wouldn’t love me anymore. You would no longer want me as your new best friend.

If I’d known then what I know now, I would have told my little baby self that being strong and masculine has everything to do with having the courage and audacity to be different. It’s such a better way to be a man—bold and courageous—than squashing it down and trying to fit into a very basic idea of how men are supposed to be. Not to mention that the concepts around masculinity are as tired as the day is long.

But just like joy and pain coexist, so can discomfort and humor. Which is why you gotta buckle up, buttercup, because I can go from comedy to tragedy in three seconds flat. And that’s not damaged or not normal.

To me, those are core American family values: cheering on a corrupt institutional body that’s super problematic with money and opportunity but we all pretend like it’s an equal playing field and celebrate it- what’s more American than that?

I just wanna be fit and have good blood pressure and feel good with my clothes off and I do. I love my body but I think that there’s always a part of me that wishes I looked more like Antoni or like an underwear model. But then again, I still really love to binge eat at McDonald’s at night, so...you know.

Learning to parent yourself, with soothing compassionate love, forgiving yourself, and learning from all the decisions you made to get you to where you are—that’s the key to being fulfilled. Learning to be the dream parent cheerleader to yourself. It’s been in you the whole time. And no matter how down you get, you can always make a gorgeous recovery.

Not to mention my grandparents’ generation grew up in the Depression and World War II and didn’t have the ability to teach what they did not know. Self-care, self-love, and nurturing yourself were all considered hogwash. Just eat a balanced diet of a bottle of wine a night, a protein, a carb, and a vegetable, push your feelings down, and get on with it.

But after nearly two years, still working as an assistant and having the goalposts for what I’d need to become a stylist constantly moving, I knew that I wasn’t going to make it there. It wasn’t worth giving up my well-being and working in a toxic and frequently abusive environment to make 20 percent from a clientele that I knew I would have to build myself.

My philosophy was very much to embrace yourself and love what you are, instead of making you something you're not. Refine what you already have- don't change it at its core. We have all done things we never thought we could and been places we never thought we could go. Good and bad. As scary as this can be I want you to know no matter how broken you feel, and how seemingly unlikely it is, we are never too broken to heal. More than that, there will be people who love and accept you completely, and there will be people who do not. If you love and accept yourself all the way, no matter what, through thick and thin, then either way you will make it through.

Navigating through trauma, depression, and despair is a full time job, which made it even more crucial that I found some light in the dark

Joyful accomplishments exist next to painful memories

You're only as happy as your most miserable child

More families should watch the Olympics together. To me, those are core American family values: Cheering on a corrupt institutional body that’s super problematic with money and opportunity but we all pretend like it’s an equal playing field and celebrate it—what’s more American than that?

a middle-class teacher or a working-class taxi driver in San Francisco, and if every morning you watch as millionaires who look like teenagers queue on Van Ness Avenue for the Google bus, the status gap probably feels even bigger than the income gap.

You can’t be fiercely loving without also being passionate—and sometimes passionate isn’t pretty.

In thearpy, I had learned about selective permeability, a term that pertains to cellular membranes letting some, but not all molecules enter the cell. The same can apply to interaction with people. Not taking on the experience or negative of other, but staying open to accepting joy or gratitude.

The most dorito-shaped, hold me til the pain goes away then run me over in your car, then resurrect me with your perfect, square-shaped, yet spherical endlessly hard meat pecs I've ever seen.

I had been stung by the content creation bee. She's an elusive little creature; her sting is highly addictive. Her symptoms include: a constant need for creative expression, an incessant thirst for validation, and a sense of having something to say, but not knowing quite how to say it.

Letting go of that idea that I needed to be normal or that I somehow wasn't normal just because I needed to prioritize self care to be healthy is the biggest gift I've ever given myself. Being normal is being completely unique, because nobody's the same.

Being able to entertain yourself is a valuable skill, especially if you’re in a prolonged dark space.

It’s each one of our jobs to reject that comparison of what we think beauty is and realize we are the motherfucking beauty. What we see on the outside doesn’t always reflect what is inside, and vice versa. The only thing that matters is keeping your facts straight about how worthy you are of your own acceptance and love. Confidence is more about having courage to say you don’t always feel on and poppin’. You’re like, I’m not sure about how this outfit totally is working but damn it, I came to slay. Because I’m just so grateful for this moment.

But if your parents pay the bills, they run the house. The emphasis is less on raising someone who can take care of themselves and more on following the ideas that have been passed down to you. And then suddenly, you're 18, you become a baby adult who is so angry and doesn't know how to self-soothe. You only know how to soothe your parents' nervous system.

It wasn’t until I had lost everything I thought I wanted that I realized being an adult wasn’t about being “normal,” or having a life that seems enviable to people from the outside. Being a fulfilled and successful adult has required accepting that I do have an inner child who was hurt and traumatized. It’s my job as an adult to nurture him, alongside all the other parts of me that make me who I am.

Learning to hold a safe space for people to share with me while maintaining my well-being is a delicate dance.

not taking on the experiences or negativity of others, but staying open to accepting joy or gratitude)

Comparing ourselves to people on social media is as risky as using WebMD to diagnose yourself.

I think the only universal key to processing grief is to have compassion for yourself, to be able to ask yourself what it is you really need, and to not care about how others perceive your process.

You're never too broken to be fixed.