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I want a person to kiss hello.
This whole conversation is a flashing sign that reads DEAD END.
I suck in a breath. This is what it feels like when your life starts happening, I think.
Because for the first time in my life, I fit. I fit without any question.
The only voice that isn’t there—the one I need the most—is my own.
But that sounds pretty unbelievable. Even to me. And I was there.
It was funny. I used to think of myself
as a Monday and Ellen as a Friday. But Mondays and Fridays were just twenty-four-hour stretches of time with different names.
If I could unzip my skin and step outside of myself, I would.
“Have you ever walked into a building that is dedicated to being everything you’re not? I want to be healthy, but I also want to be happy.”
I feel good. It makes me feel good. To be wanted, but not had.
Her smear of blue eye shadow is an unheard call to the person she always wanted to be.
The girls who enter have got to be proud enough of themselves to say they deserve to compete.
That kind of unflinching confidence makes me uneasy in a way it never has before.
I’m not sure how to form the words or even if I’m ready to peel back that layer of myself to let him see.
Something about the way his skin felt against mine drew all these doubts to the surface that I didn’t even know I had.
My body is the villain. That’s how she sees it. It’s a prison, keeping the better, thinner version of me locked away.
There are so many things that Lucy never did. Not because she couldn’t, but because she told herself she couldn’t
It’s supposed to be easier to like yourself when someone else likes you.
No matter how much I tell myself that the fat and the stretch marks don’t matter, they do.
I think maybe it’s the things we don’t want to talk about that are the things people most want to hear.
Maybe you only ever notice the distance when it’s you who’s being left behind.
good friendships are durable. They’re meant to survive the gaps and the growing pains.”
The last permission I need to be my own role model.
think you gotta be who you want to be until you feel like you are whoever it is you’re trying to become.
Sometimes half of doing something is pretending that you can.”
wish there were some kind of magic words that could bridge the gap between the person I am and the one I wish I could be.
I’ve never seen anyone who’s living the life they set out to live like she does.”
“I guess I would rather talk to you everywhere.”
want Lucy to see this. To see that I’ve connected the dots of her fragmented life, and here I am.
But I waited for that to happen to me. And y’all are making it happen now.
You love big, but you hurt big, too.
I’m ready to make myself feel this way.
When your options are limited to being miserable in private or being mortified in public, there is no choice.
“But guys like Bo don’t date girls like us.”
Hannah may not get what it feels like to wonder if you’re going to fit into a chair with armrests or how anytime a floor creaks beneath your weight, everyone looks at you like you’re about to break the entire building. She might not get what it’s like to walk into a mall and know that 90 percent of the clothes won’t fit you or that even thinking about going to a buffet is a bad idea, because a fat person at a buffet is a joke waiting to happen.
It’s like the whole world has to walk around with name tags on so we can all feel more comfortable? I guess things are less scary if you know what to call them.”
Beautiful, he says. Fat, I think.
But can’t I be both at the same time? I
But I met Bo, and now I know what it feels like for one person’s name to wreck you.
I walk into a room and the first thing anyone notices is how fucking huge I am in comparison.
It’s so easy, I think, to say so in my head. Even out loud. But doing. Taking his hand and saying I deserve this. We deserve this. That’s terrifying.
There’s some kind of peace that comes with knowing that for every person who is waiting to be found, there’s someone out there searching.
let the glitter fall where it may.
There’s something about swimsuits that make you think you’ve got to earn the right to wear them.
Do you have a body? Put a swimsuit on it.
