The Family Outing Quotes

“All change is abrupt, even the change that happens slowly over time. There's always a singular moment that defines it: It's the flip of a switch, the wrong turn, the letter opened, the instant of knowing. Afterward, you search back to see who you were in the seconds before the change. You try to experience the feeling of life you have just left. But it's as impossible as trying to conjure the feeling of snow in summer.”
― Jessi Hempel, The Family Outing

“You'll know, even as I use the word "Evan," that Evan had a name before this. It's a name I won't tell you. To utter it would be to disrespect all the work he has done to find his way to Evan. The more you get to know him, the more you'll see the pronouns, and the names, don't matter at all. Evan teaches me that there is an endless quality to truth; the external details constantly shift as we move closer to the emotional centers of our lives. And you can try to explain it, but it will be no easier than explaining infinity. Not everything can be explained. Some things must be accepted.”
― Jessi Hempel, The Family Outing

“We all came out of the closet, and now we're okay. These things are correlated, but they are not causal. Coming out was an inevitability. For close to two decades, my family lived in the shadow of our closets. We lived with the pain that comes with living one's most authentic self, and the pain that comes from being raised by people who are hiding their most authentic selves.”
― Jessi Hempel, The Family Outing

“As an adult, I'll come to understand that the price of belonging to a church community, or to any community, is accepting beliefs that you don't hold. Sometimes these beliefs are so incongruous with your own that you have to break away from that community and leave it. But when the community is how you define yourself, second only to your name, that breaking away comes with a steep price. You'll be alone. You must reconstitute yourself. You must search for new communities or build your own.”
― Jessi Hempel, The Family Outing