Notes to Self
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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between August 6 - August 18, 2019
6%
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I have learned that breaking the silence is not about bravery. It is about what we choose to do with our vulnerability. Vulnerability is not one thing, healing is not one thing, authenticity is not one thing; they are individual, and they are complicated, and they are radical. We have so many stories to tell.
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It is hard to love an addict. Not only practically difficult, in the picking up after them and the handling of those aspects of life they’re not able for themselves, but metaphysically hard. It feels like bashing yourself against a wall, not just your head, but your whole self. It makes your heart hard. Caught between endless ultimatums (stop drinking) and radical acceptance (I love you no matter what) the person who loves the addict exhausts and renews their love on a daily basis.
14%
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Dad has always seemed happiest when he was as far away from his family as possible. It’s not an accident that he moved to an island that is so hard to get to for so much of the year.
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Our relationship may be an unyielding kind of story, a chain of unalterable moments, from arguments in bars to vigils at hospital bedsides. But it is also, just as powerfully, an ever-changing conversation between two people, father and daughter, a conversation that we are both grateful is not over. These days, sometimes he’ll call and I am busy and he is self-involved and I snap and he snaps back and I hang up. I text him that I will phone later but, often, I forget my promise. Sometimes he’ll call and he’ll tell me his news, some village gossip that I can barely follow but I listen anyway, ...more
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Women are well-rehearsed in the rituals of bodily self-appraisal. We look at the women around us, we look at ourselves, and we compare. Are we alike, are we superior, are we inferior? There is a terrible solidarity to this ritual, given that almost no woman can avoid it. It is like living with a negative cheerleader, this constant background hum that our bodies are not desirable, not acceptable, not normal.
62%
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It does not matter that I think hair removal is a sadistic, time-consuming and expensive tax on women. It only matters that not fully paying this tax makes me weird.
63%
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Sometimes, when I am in the company of more glamorous women, I wonder if I—a white, Western, middle-class, heterosexual, cis-gender woman—am a “proper girl” at all. Just like that, “Am I a proper girl?” I look from myself to the women around me and I feel that I do not measure up. And then that’s when I know that I am a girl, that I am proper. Because, of course, this paranoia, that I am not feminine enough, not desirable enough, not good enough, is the ultimate performance of femininity. This paranoia is a crucial part of how women are policed. And of how we police ourselves.