This Time for Me Quotes

“Each transition should be a party. If one receives an invitation and does not wish to attend, please RSVP and leave a present at the door.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“Blind luck can only go so far. No one’s that lucky. There has to be something else going on. Every day when I walk into class, you remind me that I can survive anything—that there is an inexplicable force at work. As you go through life, you bring with you a glorious sense of self and the courage to reflect, fall down, and crumble. I have seen you time after time get right back up off the floor and try again. That’s divine. That’s power.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“The breaking and falling apart and the worrying and the discovering and the exploring and the loving and the regretting and the forgiveness—all these emotions are human. I believe there is a divine sense of being in every single moment.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“I had met the cast a week or so prior at the table read, where everyone gathers around a large table and reads the words of the script for the very first time. Jeffrey and I had chatted for a few minutes.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“Driving through the gates of Paramount studios is surreal, but driving through the gates of Paramount studios when you actually work there is something else entirely.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“I finally became the first Trans assistant professor in the history of the CSULB Theatre Arts Department. I now had a “real” career. I was a legitimate certified teacher. I was here, grounded and making my way through it all over again, but this time I wasn’t going to let go. I wanted tenure.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“My wife is an unbelievable student. I watched as she confronted her life and death with wit and smarts and facts and grace and more courage than I ever thought possible. And one by one, moment by moment, my Watching became Doing. I did stuff. I brought her things. I took her here and there—made sure she wasn’t late for this and that.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“At least our stories were beginning to be noticed as part of the human experience. That was a victory. At least . . . that’s what I tried to convince myself of. The actress who replaced me was Felicity Huffman. The movie was Transamerica.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“My father was buried a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, and my uncle Chuck let me know that when they folded the flag, they usually give it to the oldest living female of the family. He asked if I wanted to receive it. I refused it. I didn’t want a flag, and I didn’t want a ceremony, and I didn’t want guns going off, and I didn’t want a reception. I wanted my parents back.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“Her need to dominate and hold power became a source of emotional violence in our house. She was the woman. I was not. That was that.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“The next day, Proposition Eight passed and suddenly, because I was a Transgender Female and I had fallen in love with a Cisgender Female, what we were last night was no longer what we were this morning. But just as it had been the first time . . . there was nothing anyone could do about it.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“I began to rediscover a voice I thought I’d lost. And hearing myself, I began to shatter and fall apart. I was held by Chrisanne, and I was seen by Honey, and I slowly realized, like Dorothy had in her own fairy tale, that this magical sound I thought I’d lost had actually been with me all the time.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“and I wanted everyone to see me the way I wanted to be seen. But that was not what happened. People see what you show them, and many times, what I showed them had very little to do with who I was. I wanted to be them. I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be anyone who wasn’t me.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“I had had affairs with women in this way, emotional and kind and loving, but the men I’d been with had been all about sex. As I grew into my idea of the feminine construct, which I knew only from what I had witnessed and what I had been taught, the idea of being with men should have made more sense to me. It didn’t.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“I had wanted a man so that I could be a woman. I wanted all the things I had read about and all the things I had seen in movies—someone to open my door, put on my coat, carry me, lift me, get things for me, make sure I was okay and beautiful and alive on the planet and that I mattered. I wanted a man to hear me and walk like a man with me, so that other people would see that I was not the man.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“I never hooked because I was forced to. I wanted to hook. I liked it. I liked the power and the control I had, especially over men. I had accumulated so much resentment that keeping them at bay was a pleasure.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“Then he opened his blood-red-lipsticked mouth, and in his best Bea Arthur contralto he warbled, “Call me Helga.” He was a United States senator. Still is, I think.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“There is a truth and a power in singing, and I was nowhere near ready to begin to excavate.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“My instincts have always been my greatest savior, and they were in high gear. Ultimately, my self-protective carapace actually saved my life. Luckily, my parents gave in with the stipulation that if within the span of one year I was not working steadily as an actor, I would go to school.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“I was an outcast. I simply wasn’t one of the shiny gay boys. California living was gorgeous. California living was surreal. But the sheer blinding truth of it made me want to flee.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“Plopped in the middle of a rehearsal, surrounded by queers and show tunes, there was magic. I was free and unbound and filled with wonder.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“In all fairy tales, there are witches and dragons. There are heroes and magical talismans. There are tornadoes, red shoes, and yellow brick roads. There are close calls and near misses. There are beautiful endings and insidious beginnings. There are births. There are deaths. And for me, there was a princess asleep in the heart space of a presumed prince. And I was lucky enough to marry her.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me

“Even when faced with it, the truth eludes me. I much prefer the world I create to the world I inhabit.”
― Alexandra Billings, This Time for Me