Megan Stielstra > Quotes

“There’s a great essay about this by Aubrey Hirsch. She says judging another mother is like critiquing a woman being eaten by wolves. “That’s not what I want to do,” Hirch writes. “I want to say ‘Hey, Mama! You looked like a badass bitch taking on those wolves!’ and ‘Aren’t those wolves crazy?!’ and ‘Tell me how you’re surviving these wolf attacks.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays

“At some point, our education no longer belongs to our teachers. It belongs to us.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays

“There are so many reasons not to try. They all start with I’m scared.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays

“When I look back at my sexual history - those singular still shots and picture postcards - so little of it involves the actual physical act. Rather the before and after - the buildup to and takeaway from. It's me figuring out what I want and what I'm worth, a long line of cause and effect that started with spinning and ended in electricity.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays – Intellectually Fierce and Achingly Human Stories on Art, Courage, and Justice

“It doesn’t matter if the work is personal or political. It doesn’t matter if it’s a story or an essay. Some people will come after us no matter what we say. We might as well say things that matter.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays – Intellectually Fierce and Achingly Human Stories on Art, Courage, and Justice

“Be a mom and a working artist and whatever the hell else you want and yes, you will make work after the baby comes and yes, it will be hard and yes, you will be tired but more than that, a thousand times more, it will be amazing and life changing in ways I’m only beginning to understand. And if you don’t want to have a kid, if you choose not to go that way, then I’m standing behind you, too, cheering my face off because what has meaning in this life is living it full and true.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays

“* My friend Bobby works with storytellers in their seventies and eighties in senior living facilities around Chicago. Recently, they told him they don’t like the word “senior.” Bobby asked them what they’d prefer and they said “third-ager,” which I believe comes from the French: teenage, middle age, third age.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays

“I could’ve said a thousand things in that moment, and all of them would’ve been true. I’d like to travel—Florence and Thailand and Prague. I’d like to write books. I’d like to fall in love a thousand times. Live hard and desperate and full, my pulse pounding like a bass drum. And when I wake up one morning suddenly, surprisingly, a grown-up, I’d like to be sure in the knowledge that I enjoyed it. Every fucking second.”
― Megan Stielstra, Once I Was Cool: Personal Essays

“*  *  * If this information is new to you, don’t worry. It was to me, too. This is why Jesus gave us Google.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays

“I’d forgotten about them until this very moment, pushed out of my memory from years of dating boys in indie rock bands, boys who scoffed at my love of PJ Harvey, boys who saw my copy of Jagged Little Pill and asked why the fuck was I listening to her, boys who would’ve most certainly ridiculed my love of a cappella. And if they didn’t like my music, they wouldn’t like me, right? Right? If there are any young women reading this and those above sentences sound familiar, if you’re hiding parts of yourself to look cool or make someone love you, please repeat after me: fuck that noise. You are perfect. You matter. Hold on to what you love, the songs and books and style and obsessions and causes and questions that make you you. Find people who love these things, too. When you get lost, they’ll help you find your way back to yourself.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays

“I've always engaged with the heart as a metaphor: a desire, a thing to survive, to heal from or shoot for.

Now I know there's nothing more real.

We walk through the world at its leisure. We're here at its mercy and with its blessing.

At some point, we have to ask ourselves how we want to live.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays – Intellectually Fierce and Achingly Human Stories on Art, Courage, and Justice

“It was so much easier with him. He didn’t need me to love him.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays

“* He also had every Masters of the Universe action figure including Rattlor and Two Bad and Zoar the fighting falcon, however—and this is very important—he did not have Castle Grayskull. So one time he and his friends told me I couldn’t play with them because I was a girl and Masters of the Universe were for boys and I went home crying and told my parents, and even though money was tight, even though they weren’t fans of Barbie-type plastic toys, even though they believed in solving problems with logic and discussion (“Use your head,” they’d say, “your words”), we went straight to Kmart and bought Teela and Evil-Lyn and the Sorceress. (Where are their pants? I wondered. Aren’t they cold?) And—the icing on my six-year-old fuck you cake—that ginormous plastic castle. I was hot shit on the block, I tell you what. Know what else? I shared.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays

“A memory not in my head but my bones.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays

“Is this a story or an essay? It doesn’t matter. Here’s what I want it to say: You are supposed to be here. You are needed. We need you. We’re imagining the world.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays – Intellectually Fierce and Achingly Human Stories on Art, Courage, and Justice

“I want to find my own feelings in someone else’s experiences. I want to live lives I couldn’t possibly have lived, exist in a reality that can’t possibly be real—that’s what a story can do.”
― Megan Stielstra, Everyone Remain Calm

“The sun was climbing behind them, over the alley, the three-flats, my city. I thought of that morning in New Orleans and how much fun I’d had. I thought of my students and what I wanted to teach them about writing, and all of a sudden, I felt that click: when avoiding your life becomes more difficult than actually living it. “Fine,” I told the Drum Master. “But no ‘Saints Go Marching In.’” His feather nodded and, in one fluid motion, he lifted up on his toes and dropped his whole body. Humboldt Park didn’t know what hit it.”
― Megan Stielstra, Everyone Remain Calm

“You don’t get to hate something just because you don’t understand it.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays

“It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.” “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.” “How vain it is to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live.” —and now picture me nearly two decades later: in my pajamas, in New Orleans, reciting Thoreau’s words over and over as Abe gave me the address. What would Henry say? He’d say, Get your ass to the Funky Butt. (Except he probably wouldn’t say ass.)”
― Megan Stielstra, Everyone Remain Calm