Jill Gutowitz > Quotes

“I’ve spent more than a decade examining why I feel this insatiable need for attention and external gratification, to make people laugh, to feel seen and noticed and understood; trying to make sense of why nothing I ever do or say or create feels good enough without a financial reward or widespread appreciation, things I’ve tied to my own self-worth, which I can’t seem to untether. But how can I? Once you tie anything to survival, especially in those adolescent years, untangling that knot is tough stuff.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“Recently, I’ve discovered something troubling about myself, that it’s the wanting that I actually yearn for. The only exciting part of life is the part where the Thing hasn’t happened yet, where I’m still chasing it. When we want something, we’re living in a fantasy of having that thing—whether that’s a person, success, a new job, whatever—”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“We romanticized things. We built up this grand idea of what a first kiss was supposed to look like, based on all the movies we'd seen and sweet stories we'd heard about that first kiss that's impossible to forget. And yet, ours was so forgettable. Had it even been with someone we actually liked, it still could never have lived up to the impossible expectations we had foisted upon it.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“You can’t choose your trauma soundtrack; your trauma soundtrack chooses you.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“The point is: if an activity or a show or a thing is only (or mostly) adored by men, that's a red flag.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“I wrote these essays, selfishly, as a stab at healing my own wounds, but I also wrote them for you: for every LGBTQ person who has felt weird about their queerness, for every woman who’s struggled with self-worth, for every person who has felt othered, ashamed, ghastly.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“I knew that I could never truly be seen by these boys, be respected by these boys, if they didn't also want me. That was the power I needed to maintain over them: You should think I'm funny and smart, but you should also want to fuck me. Because if you don't want to fuck me, then I am worthless to you, and thus, this world. It's fun here, isn't it?”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“Take a look at the bridge of “Mean” by Taylor Swift: “Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me” says it all. Becoming something so supermassive that you transcend your self, your human form, and metamorphose into a larger being: a billboard, an icon, a thing that’s representative of a groupthink, a collection of a generation’s conscious thoughts—that’s the goal, right? One can harm a person, but one cannot harm an idea.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“Where did I get the idea that love is strictly about yearning, or yearning followed by tragedy? Oh yeah, from like, the five lesbian movies that existed.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“For queer people, there's something special about finding another queer person. And we do--we find each other, don't we? "Gaydar" feels like a term invented by a straight woman for the sole purpose of outing closeted men, but there's an underlying and universal purpose to the concept of gaydar. It's finding your pack; it's survival. Queer people have never, ever-even now, when so much about the world is objectively better than it used to be-been able to live our lives as freely and openly and spectacularly as straight people have. We've always had to find each other, in dark corners of gay bars, in back alleys, in niche Tumblr fandoms, to survive.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“There used to be Famouses and Normals. Now the concept of fame itself has been cremated and sprinkled over the gen pop. We are all living in a sliding scale of visibility: some people are just more visible than others, as in, have more followers.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“Women are told that so much of his behavior is normal, par-for-the-course male ego, rage, sexuality. It's not. You're going to learn that very soon, and then you're going to be angry with yourself for not knowing. Don't be. Be angry at the world that told you to weather it, and told him that he was right.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“Right now, it seems scary, I know. But trust me, this will be the most freeing, healing, terrifying, awesome, excruciating, magnificent, supermassive thing you will ever do with your life. And you know what? The experience is all yours. No one can take that away from you. Are you going to have to learn how to feel a sliver of control over your body again? Yeah. You will. Is your relationship with sex going to morph and suffer? Yeah. Big time. But then it really will change for the best, and you'll be better off. You're going to meet so many women who make you feel so many things, who make you feel sexy, and safe, and dangerous, and alive in ways you didn't know were possible for you. They're going to rip your heart out and stomp on it, but that's okay.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“Visible queerness was okay if it wasn't for queer women. One thing that became pretty clear to me was that lesbianism was for men.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“My reality tore at the seams like low-rise jeans ill equipped to house a normal human body.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“I don’t think I ever envisioned a happy ending as being a possibility, or a choice.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“Still, the men I dated were a fractured, fun-house-mirror reflection of my peers' desires, but not my own. And the hardest pill to swallow, looking back on it all, is that I didn't even think much about what I did want. I didn't fantasize. The people I dated didn't matter to me. I was so wholly unperturbed by love and sex that I didn't even wonder what might feel better, what I might crave, what I might yearn for. I just floated through my "love" life dead-eyed, unaffected, numb. I felt nothing at all. I remember when I started yearning, though.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“That’s what I was really looking for: an escape from who I was, a trapdoor I could crawl through to leave my own body, my own self—anything that could make me not me, not this thing I didn’t want to be.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“I know the adolescent phenomenon of staring wistfully out of a rainy car window and pretending you're in an Avril Lavigne music video doesn't belong exclusively to lesbians, but I'm talking about the collective energy of this experience. Lesbians are the energy of staring wistfully out of a rainy car window and pretending you're in an Avril Lavigne music video, personified. And that's because yearning is an inherent part of the queer female experience. And I'm not talking about, like, the 2018 awards cycle, when Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga essentially performed yearning to sell their movie. I'm also not talking about Sally Rooney's Normal People, which is about a heterosexual couple who, for reasons unbeknownst, cannot be together because one plays football and the other one... reads books? Straight people, someone needs to tell you this once and for all. You are allowed to be together. You have always been allowed to be together. Romeo and Juliet is essentially hetero fanfic about what it's like to be gay. Your parents hate each other-who cares! For people who experience same-sex attraction, sometimes yearning is all we have. For me, yearning used to be everything-so much so that it damaged the relationships in my adult life. But before I had yearning, I existed in the Thirst Vacuum-a space that was so dark, so desolate, I couldn't yearn for anyone at all.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“So when I came to reconcile myself with queerness, and found peace with it, I felt lighter in many other ways, ways that opened me up to new experiences, new interests, newfound appreciations.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“The hours of the day alternated between absolutely horrifying and excruciatingly dull.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“I had the kind of palpable nervous energy that makes anyone in proximity to my shivering body nervous too.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“Nowadays, queer teens have no idea how good they have it, with their lesbian-outfit Instagram accounts and their dreary homophobia movies and their JoJo Siwas. Back in my day (2003), finding something gay to be horny over was like navigating the Oregon Trail. You'd have to run home from school and sit in front of the TV for hours waiting for the "Me Against the Music" video to play on MTV, just so you could get a sliver of gay, and that would be your only shot at seeing gay that whole day. No quietly streaming Netflix on your laptop in your room, no saving photos of Cara Delevingne and Selena Gomez showering together to camera roll, no "every Jamie and Dani scene in The Haunting of Bly Manor" compilation video on YouTube. Just a single queerbait moment of the day with absolutely no idea when it would come or ability to plan for it. Just sit and wait for Britney and Madonna to flirt. Oh, you have to go to the bathroom? What if you miss it? No, you'll be fine, just go. You missed it. The flash of a moment where Britney pins Madonna against the wall and they almost kiss is gone. Sorry you ate too many SunChips and got diarrhea and blew past the only possible lesbianism you could find today. You died of dysentery. You missed the gay; try again tomorrow.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“If a person was outed, the cloak of normalcy and acceptance that heterosexuality provided would fall. Back then, I saw queerness through this jumbled, mind-fuck, cracked lens. I didn’t want anyone to speculate about me, and I certainly didn’t want them to be right. Because if they were, my cloak would fall, and I’d have to forfeit the acceptance I clung to for a much, much more difficult life.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“I’ve always cared—probably too much—about pop culture because I’ve always been transfixed by the ways other people’s stories affect our own, my own.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“I’m tired of lugging around the big bag of little traumas I’ve collected”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“I wish I didn’t romanticize self-torture so much, or feel like the suffering was the correct feeling, just because it was the strongest one.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“Donald Trump has passed away (just putting this energy out into the world—maybe by the time this book comes out, it’ll be true).”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“Repression severely delayed me from experiencing love, sex and dating like many heterosexual teenagers had the luxury of doing.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays

“… entertainment recently has left be absolutely gobsmacked - because it’s just so fucking gay.”
― Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays