Mimi Zhu > Quotes

“the system fails us again and again and creates the illusion that we are the ones who are failing”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“I felt like a bruised burden, and in my refusal to become a victim, I neglected the tenderness of being a survivor”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“Perhaps numbness does not signify a “lack” of feeling, just as deserts do not lack for life”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“I have tried to return to an "untainted" version of myself, one that was oblivious to the visceral natures of pain and loss. I obsess over an imagined place of "purity", where the ghosts of my past do not roam, and I realize that as vital as it is to release my hauntings, I cannot return to a self who is untouched by pain. I do not live in a world without pain, and I cannot pretend that pain does not continue as I continue too.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“I am grateful for the ways that I have protected myself in the past, for that tells me that I want to live. It tells me that, even if I do not know it, I cherish my miraculous life.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“Numbness prompted me to tend to the life in my desert and prepare myself for feeling. The rain was quickly approaching.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“I am not broken, even though my heart has been.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“We must learn to discern between natural and manufactured numbness, and honor natural numbness as a call for tenderness with one another and ourselves.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“My shame unraveled into a cycle of self-destruction.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“While it is important to recognize our numbness as a crucial stage of healing, it is also important to remember that we do not have to do it alone”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“It is profound and beautiful when human beings converge, experiment, and connect in our togetherness, and people who try to police those spaces only do so because they know how powerful community can be. They are afraid, and they want us to be afraid of ourselves.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“Grief is an ancestor who teaches us to exercise constant and immense gratitude. Funerals are opportunities for us to express unconditional love. There is much to learn from swimming in the deep shades of our grief, and we will emerge from it basking in the sun. If we cannot honor our endings, then how are we supposed to usher in new beginnings?”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“Capitalism seeks to replicate numbness not to heal, but to ensure that we can continue working and consuming to avoid pain, which is deemed unproductive.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“We must do the labor of deep unlearning. Love cannot coexist alongside fetish and domination, and we must free ourselves of these fantasies that turn us into vases, shadows, and ghosts. One of the only ways to rebuke these hollow fantasies is to be grounded in community and to relearn what abundant love can truly look like. I want to trust in love, and I can only be in a loving, trusting relationship with somebody who is also willing to sacrifice these illusions of 'power', release their learned ideas of fetishistic desirability, and dismantle these structures of domination.”
― Mimi Zhu

“People who have been deeply traumatized by colonization, war, and violence have been in post-traumatic
shock for generations, while capitalism expertly endeavors to pacify intergenerational pain and create more cycles of addiction. Furthermore, corporations attempt to sedate hurt people who deserve healing, and get
richer from profiting off the pain that they have caused.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“When we feel isolated, it is easier for us to be controlled. When our worlds seem small, our yearning for belonging can be manipulated.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“Numbness is not a sensation merely created by man-made machines. It is a lesson found in the natural world when personhood meets pain.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“Denial masquerades as an accomplice to the expansiveness of numbness, but in fact it endeavors to break us into shards of our truth.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“Numbness is a time of preparation for abundance.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“There is no emotion I would ever tell you not to feel. I do not write to encourage you to overcome any emotion. Instead, I encourage you to sit with each emotion.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“We thought we could not live without each other, but after a while that kind of living does not feel like living at all.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“The excuses became an armor that pushed away the pain, but painful feelings do not relent even when faced with brute force.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“Every feeling I had been avoiding for the past year bubbled up in this “empty” space, somehow giving me full and unabashed permission to feel.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“Anger, like numbness, is another sacred protector of our survival. It is a loving act to protect yourself, a loving at to resist harm, and a loving act to allow yourself the sacred breath of anger.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“Our addiction was fueled by our fears of scarcity, heartbreak, and neglect.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“I was steeped so deep in shame, and ironically, the only thing that could ease my shame was the insecure and fragmented promise of being “loved” by him”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“I felt pressured to conform to a speedy and clean recovery that required no true vulnerability, grief, or ugliness. I did not allow myself tears or solitude, and soon I began to control and dismiss myself in the very same ways that he did.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“Stewing in shame is a trap that halts possibilities for change, healing and accountability.”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

“we must learn to establish firm boundaries within these virtual worlds that encourage us to consume our own suffering”
― Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection