Perhaps that is where the distinction between language and action becomes most useful. Words are not meaningless. They can be extraordinary, and they can cross years, countries and circumstances in ways that very little else can. They can alter the course of a life. They can also describe a relationship more beautifully than the relationship is actually being lived.

Call it what it is — grave robbery, not inheritance. And it should disgust you exactly as much as the Klan does — not because the two have inflicted equal damage on the world, they plainly have not, but because the thing underneath both of them is identical: a belief that a person's worth, loyalty, and right to belong can be settled by looking at their blood. Scale tells you how much harm an idea has managed to do. It doesn't tell you whether the idea is rotten. This one is rotten no matter how small the group holding it is.

Truth of companionship.

If something doesn’t work, change it. If a place doesn’t work, leave it. If a person consistently brings dishonesty, misery, or disrespect into your life, move on.

the three least dramatic nouns in this life, quietly holding the roof up while everything else becomes a coordinated collapse.

I guess I really miss being myself. None of it feels like me. It feels like doable, bearable, and helpful. I don’t want to sugar coat it. The worlds changed and it’s not geared toward being a woman, or even human… maybe it never was or will be.

I’m tired. Yet, I’m still determined. I don’t believe this is our ceiling.

There has to be something better waiting for the ones who come after us.

Do not fear their reaction to you. It is not worth folding yourself into something so small that you fail to exist. Find the other strange ones who are still trying. Then go home, close the door, and return to your works and love.

Life is short. Most people are understandably focused on their own lives, goals, and priorities.

Likability was never a reliable measure of goodness. It was sometimes simply nothing more than a sign of how much had been suppressed. What becomes possible, slowly, is disappointing others without disappearing in the process.

Releasing the need for approval requires allowing others their disappointment, risking being misread, accepting that integrity may cost belonging. It doesn't reject connection. It denies the hidden contracts of self-denial that connections sometimes ask for.

When I remember the dock, I no longer think about the person I was trying to escape.

I think about the woman sitting quietly among the reeds and lilies, listening to the water, unaware that she was practicing for the rest of her life.