Thanks for Waiting Quotes

“Once again, it was as if when every other girl was born, a nurse had handed their parents a handbook with instructions on how to be a girl, but the day I was born, the copy machine at the hospital was broken and the nurse had just looked at me and told my parents, Well, she’ll just have to figure it out. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
― Doree Shafrir, Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

“Maybe all the stumbling through and making mistakes and feeling bad about myself for so long had been for a reason. Maybe being a late bloomer wasn’t an accident. Maybe it was the point. I was a late bloomer because I had struggled to make sense of who I was and how I was meant to move through the world, but now that I’m here, and living out my late bloomerdom in all its glory, I can finally have empathy for the person I’d fought so hard not to be—and appreciate her, deeply. I used to worry so much about how I had “missed the memo” or wasn’t doing things at the same time as everyone else, but now I see that it was only because I had had those experiences that I’m able to be happy and fulfilled. It”
― Doree Shafrir, Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

“Being able to show myself—my true self—to the world is a privilege, and one that I don’t take for granted, and I believe that those of us who enjoy that privilege owe it to our fellow women to help them find their way there too.”
― Doree Shafrir, Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

“A year ago, I’d been impressed by the depths of the rage of the beautiful woman I’d encountered in a barre class, the grimness with which she was “working on herself” in front of the mirror, but I hadn’t fully identified with her anger. Now, I realized, women are conditioned to believe that their anger not only isn’t valid but also is something that needs to be contained or channeled into something productive. I was rejecting that notion. I just wanted to acknowledge that what I was going through sucked, and I was allowed to be really fucking angry about it, and I wanted everyone else to know how angry I was, too.”
― Doree Shafrir, Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

“I started to wonder what it meant to be ambitious if the career path you assumed you’d be taking—and you assumed you would want—turned out to not be so appealing after all. I had never really articulated, to myself or anyone else, that I was “ambitious,” but I felt like it was just implied. Everyone I knew wanted a promotion, to make more money, to get hired by the more prestigious website or magazine, and I had just gone along with that. But eventually, you had to stop, right?”
― Doree Shafrir, Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

“It’s a pattern that you’re familiar with. And the disappointment is part of that pattern.”
― Doree Shafrir, Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

“I really want to meet someone,” I told my friend Gabrielle over brunch. I had typically shied away from announcing my intentions so baldly—I had previously thought that it meant you were a sad, desperate, lonely person if you actually articulated that you wanted to meet someone. Now, though, I realized that not only was it okay to be all those things, but also that being single didn’t mean that you were sad, desperate, and lonely, and it was also okay to let people know that you wanted to be in a relationship. I added, “I’m just putting it out into the universe.”
― Doree Shafrir, Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

“I knew an idea of him that I had built up that was based partly on reality, but also on his emails, and also on what my fantasy of him looked like. I was able to project anything I wanted to onto him because he was so unavailable.”
― Doree Shafrir, Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

“It seemed like a classic trap that women in the workplace find themselves in: We are put in positions without any real power, and yet we are expected to clean up the messes of those who are.”
― Doree Shafrir, Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

“Why did anyone allow themselves to even try to build a life with someone, if it was just going to end with a Man With A Van, boxes of discarded books left in the lobby, and the feeling that you’d just wasted almost four years of your life?”
― Doree Shafrir, Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

“I was scared of interrogating a world in which an accomplished, brilliant, hilarious woman felt that her entire life had been a waste because she had never gotten married.”
― Doree Shafrir, Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer

“In that sense, there’s freedom in being “average” looking—I never had any illusions that I would need to rely on my looks for anything. But we’re all just at the mercy of the patriarchy, right? When I say that I’m completely average looking, by what metric am I even judging that? A metric that, for millennia, has been determined by men, internalized by women, and spat back out in the form of color-blocked leggings and matching sports bras.”
― Doree Shafrir, Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer