Leslie F*cking Jones

by Leslie Jones

When I think about how far I’ve come, I want to go back through my life and give my former self the love and respect she so often missed out on. I want to look after my younger me, tell her she’ll be alright—better than alright.

We have to take care of ourselves and realize the wonderfulness in all of us. Because once we start doing that, once we start with respecting ourselves—really getting into the business of liking ourselves—we’ll realize that each of us is a unique person with God-given gifts that we have to use to the benefit of everyone around us. You are with yourself every day, all day, all night—might as well like yourself.

So many of us try to do our own emotional oil change, but we’re not mechanics.

A lot of stuff needs to be fixed between generations. Every generation thinks they have a new set of issues to deal with, when actually it’s just a different scene, different clothes, different mechanisms, but the same damage getting passed down. And when no one talks about it—when

Every race goes through something—Black, white, Spanish, Asian… No one is free of fucked-upedness. We’ve all got baggage. But if we could just have some compassion for each other’s baggage, everything could be solved so much differently.

The psychology of what I was doing is clear: When your power is taken away, you need to reassert it somehow, and what better way than dominating something less powerful than you? I found something more innocent than me and took my agony out on it, and I was trying to regain control because it had been taken away from me.

Grant yourself some grace because life can be short, but it can be long as fuck, too. You wake up every day and you hope you make it back to your bed safely. You hope you get good sleep, and you hope you wake the fuck up. That’s