Michelle Risa

“He came to recognize that on both an individual and societal level, our physical skin is intertwined with our very being. Foucault argued that any intentional physical change to the appearance of the skin, from Botox to body art, is a ‘technology of the self’.10 We change our bodies ‘in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, perfection or immortality’. When we change our skin, we change ourselves.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“Girls start thinking about their ideal body at a shockingly early age. Thirty-four percent of five-year-old girls engage in deliberate dietary restraint at least “sometimes.” Twenty-eight percent of these girls say they want their bodies to look like the women they see in movies and on television.1 To put this into context, important developmental milestones for five-year-olds include the successful use of a fork and spoon and the ability to count ten or more objects. These are girls who are just learning how to move their bodies around in the world, yet somehow they’re already worried about how their bodies look, already seeking to take up less space.”
― Renee Engeln, Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women—and Its Impact on Health and Happiness

“Understanding when to speak on an issue and when to listen and learn is an invaluable skill I continue to hone. At times, people treat me like an opinion vending machine, asking me what I think about their favorite television show or a politician running for office or a recent calamity, as if opinion writing is merely emotional utterance rather than a practice that requires care and consideration.”
― Roxane Gay, Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business

“Spend not the remnant of thy days in thoughts and fancies concerning other men, when it is not in relation to some common good, when by it thou art hindered from some other better work. That is, spend not thy time in thinking, what such a man doth, and to what end: what he saith, and what he thinks, and what he is about, and such other things or curiosities, which make a man to rove and wander from the care and observation of that part of himself, which is rational, and overruling.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations