All the Gold Stars Quotes

“Instead of avoiding processing by leaping into the next project, Sam got ambitious about, well, peace... She mourned the all-hands-on-deck, everyone's emergency contact, always hustling version of herself, that she knew was not coming back. "So I mourned for a couple days - I mourned my youth, I mourned my innocence, I mourned everything"...
That change in identity; changing as circumstances change, rather than clinging to a fixed goal that no longer feels true, can feel like racing a ghost of yourself. My ghost self, my former self, was faster, sharper, and willing to do anything. She said yes to everything and pleased everyone. She's who I see in the mirror sometimes when I say 'no I can't' or, 'no I won't.' Or when I wonder what happened to the girl who would prove herself a million times over to an audience of no one. And smile while she was doing it.”
― Rainesford Stauffer, All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive

“When I look at myself, it's a lot of 'where is your own ambition coming from?'. And the answer is, self-loathing, and trying to earn a self that I could tolerate. Writing it down now, it feels a bit like I stumbled out of the confessional and into a crowded room. Handing over a secret everyone would have been more comfortable I keep to myself. But that was perhaps the worst slow burn realization. That self loathing could actually be productive. I internalized the belief that the more anxious I was, the faster I'd work. The worse I felt about myself, the harder I'd strive to make my work good. I strove, really, as a means of separating from myself. The worst of it is, is I couldn't exactly define what I loathed.”
― Rainesford Stauffer, All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive

“which is disproportionate to the number of enrolled Black students, and levels of disparities vary throughout the nation.”
― Rainesford Stauffer, All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive

“Baer-Tsarfati argued, via a 2020 Twitter thread,”
― Rainesford Stauffer, All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive