Kai Cheng Thom > Quotes

“I wanted to protect you, but I'm starting to think that the best thing you can do for people is teach them how to protect themselves. Every girl needs to be at least a little dangerous.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“A sanctuary is a place where the door only locks from the inside”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“You will be able to stop hurting people when you stop hurting yourself.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“there is a poem
scratched onto the walls of my throat
no one has heard it
but it is there”
― Kai Cheng Thom, A Place Called No Homeland

“Sometimes to be somebody else, you have to be nobody first”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“That's the difference between love and hunger," she says. "Hunger is a story you gt stuck in. Love's the story that takes you somewhere new.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“When you're a child trapped in a situation of physical or psychological deprivation, you learn shame as an efficient, elegant mechanism of survival: shame simultaneously shields you from the reality that danger is our of your control (since the problem is not that you're unloved and deprived; it's that you're Bad) and prevents you from doing or saying anything challenging that might provoke a threat.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

“Models of justice that centre punishment do not prevent abuse but only react to it, and they don't offer a pathway toward healing for either perpetrators or survivors. Nor do they acknowledge the dual reality that a great many perpetrators are themselves survivors.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

“a body is skin wrapped around stories, is tissue filled with veins that the truth runs through, is a box of bones with a voice inside.
i don't want to be a volcano. i want to be a garden full of flowers bursting open toward life, all of them singing,
i'm here.
i mean something.
i want to live.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“Little cocoon apartment, I love how you rattle and shake in the wind. You are mine like nothing has ever been before. Someday you'll tear open, and I'll fly out with the wings I have grown inside you. Still shimmering. Still wet.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“i have questions about heaven. i have questions about the Revolution. those questions are the same: upon whose bones do you intend to build your paradise?”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“a monster is a creature made of the truth no one else dares to speak.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“We sit together and wait. For the time to pass. For the memories to fade. For the waiting to be over”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“it's time to be curious about what lives in the ocean of you beyond the island of other people's needs. caregiver, are you curious? what if i told you: you don't need to heal others to heal yourself. you can just heal yourself. you do not need to give love to others to love yourself. you can just love yourself. within healer and helper, there is warrior, there is priestess, there is holy whore. who knows all the things you could be?”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“It's actually a very old archetype that trans girl stories get put into: this sort of tragic, plucky-little-orphan character who is just supposed to suffer through everything and wait, and if you're good and brave and patient (and white and rich) enough, then you get the big reward...which is that you get to be just like everybody else who is white and rich and boring. And then you marry the prince or the football player and live boringly ever after.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“Safety is, I believe, an inherently classed, raced, and gendered experience that frequently runs the risk of being used for regressive ends—ironically, for restricting the freedoms of the vulnerable, those who are never really safe. Often, we see the call for safety actually reinforce the power of oppressive institutions, like the police and the prison system, in our lives. When we choose safety over liberation, our movements fail.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

“It's good for you to cry sometimes. Even if there isn't a reason.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, & activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

“The world spins and spins. Sometimes, there is nothing you can do but surrender. There is nothing you can do but stand in your best friend's dingy kitchen and bake cakes and cry and hope hope hope for something better to come. Nothing you do will ever stop the world turning, will ever tilt the planet off its axis. All revolutions are futile in the end.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“a child who keeps secrets to survive becomes a soldier in their soul.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“Some people will cling on to anything that makes them feel even a little bit free.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“When they looked at me and my sister, even their love was hungry.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“for the teens who were the first one that classmate with the wild hair and the dark makeup and the frightened eyes told about the things that were happening at home. the secret keepers, the unpaid crisis responders, the ones who took frantic calls at all hours of the night and went to the high school guidance counselor ostensibly for assessment for therapy, for support for the scars on their arms, but mostly to figure out how to become therapists themselves, because no adult can help a kid the way another kid can. for the ones who grew up to be social workers and nurses and psychologists and any other flavor of professional helper, because they were already doing the helping, so they might as well get paid for it too. because helping and holding and listening and caring were the only times we felt we knew what we were doing, even though we had no idea. because that was the way that other people loved us. because maybe, we thought in our secret hearts, that’s all we were good for. caregiver, i see you.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“This is why the concept of chosen family is woven so deeply into the fabric of queer community culture: where the bonds of blood have failed us time and again, we hope that our friends, lovers, and mentors will fill the void.
We dream of relationships that stand against the test of time and gay drama, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. Shut out of the heteronormative institutions of marriage and the nuclear family for most of history, queers have traditionally turned to more daring and creative notions of kinship and sharing the future.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

“some bodies can't be touched/some poems
cannot be written/just felt”
― Kai Cheng Thom, A Place Called No Homeland

“you are always disappearing in the hope of being seen. you are always shrinking to fit into someone else’s arms. you are collapsing ever inward, a galaxy trying to become smaller.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, A Place Called No Homeland

“Honey, you hurt yourself,” she says, “because every- body around you hurts people and is hurting and that’s just the story you were given. You can’t get stuck in that. Don’t get stuck in any one story, not even your own.

“That’s the difference between love and hunger,” she says. “Hunger is a story you get stuck in. Love’s the story that takes you somewhere new.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“That's the difference between love and hunger," she says. "Hunger is a story you get stuck in. Love's the story that takes you somewhere new.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“My father taught me how to kill a man with my bare hands. He was a martial arts expert back in the day, having grown up in an honest-to-god Shaolin temple and all, and he thought that punching and kicking stuff would make me a man. It didn't work out for him, but the skills have proven quite useful.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“i guess somewhere deep inside, i hoped that if i said something elegantly enough, it would come true. that if i spoke the language of beauty maybe God would finally start listening...”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls