Living Authentically Quotes

“Chasing a person doesn’t give you value or build values in you. You earn your value by chasing morality and practicing dignity.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Too many people spend their life in fear of making a mistake. However, here is the truth: Fear is the mistake. If you block out all the doubts and listen only to what you feel in your heart, then follow that course, you waste less time in indecision and spend more time being authentic. Life is too short to settle for parttime happiness.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Never settle on a life you don't want when God is trying to give you a better life.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Reality is a dream that someone was brave enough to conquer.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“We are all lies waiting for the day when we will break free from our cocoon and become the beautiful truth we waited for.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“I will not stop living my queerness out loud.
I will not stop raining my good queer love down on the world until we all have a seat at the table.

Until expressions of love and identity are met with the wonder with which we should meet all evidence of goodness in a world as harsh and lonely as this one can be.

Until the glitter of generations of fragmented hearts just like mine are finally welcomed all the way home.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“I came out at 32.

Married my college sweetheart. Stay-at-home mama to 2 small children. Small town preacher's daughter living in a bubble of privilege she had no idea existed. Playgroups & sippy cups & easy predictability. An eternal restless, seeking edge telling me there was something more.

There was that life. It was good. Safe. Stable.
Then it was gone.

“How did you not know you were queer?”

My kids asked me this over the years. Their life in a sex-positive, queer-friendly, liberal utopian bubble made my lack of self-awareness utterly perplexing.

It is hard to know a thing when you are given no context for it.

You know there is a misfit, something not entirely right. But without options beyond compulsory heterosexuality & with a deep desire for approval, one does what one sees.
At least, that is what one does until one no longer can.

Being queer was like holding the golden ticket to a club nobody wanted to go to. I had no idea that once I blasted down those closet doors, with their bouncers of fear & religion & internal bias, the club would be lit. The way a party can be when everyone inside finally knows what it means to come home.

My queerness is a Tupperware container (thank god) that nobody will ever find a lid for. A box that cannot be closed. The reclamation of wholeness over goodness, transforming the perpetual misfit into one holy hell of a celebration.

Owning my queerness was like learning the desert floor was once the bottom of the ocean, meaning the towering 200-year-old saguaro watching over me was somehow born underwater.

It is the dogged insistence on coloring outside of every single line. It is the refusal to accept a singular definition that makes the word witch at me finally feel at home in the spaces where words are left behind.

My queerness rests its foundation on a ground named freedom. I speak it loudly because I have the freedom to do so without fear of reprisal or harm.

I claim this life of mine under the rainbow & the complexity of the history it has given me fiercely.

To love a woman in a world that said I must not will never be anything but a revolution.

And when I kiss her, trust me, entire galaxies are mine”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“something not entirely right. But without options beyond what’s expected and with a deep desire for approval, one does what one sees.

At least, that is what one does until one no longer can.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“Being queer was like holding the golden ticket to a club nobody wanted to go to. I had no idea that once I blasted down those closet doors, with their bouncers of fear, religion, and internal bias, the club would be lit. The way a party can be when everyone inside finally knows what it means to come home.

My queerness is a Tupperware container (thank god) that nobody will ever find a lid for. A box that cannot be closed. The reclamation of wholeness over goodness, transforming the perpetual misfit into one holy hell of a celebration.

Owning my queerness was like learning the desert floor was once the bottom of the ocean, meaning the towering 200-year-old saguaro watching over me was somehow born underwater. It is the dogged insistence on coloring outside of every single line.

It is the refusal to accept a singular definition that makes the word witch at me finally feel at home in the spaces where words are left behind.

My queerness rests its foundation on a ground named freedom. I speak it loudly because I have the freedom to do so without fear of reprisal or harm. I claim this life of mine under the rainbow and the complexity of the history it has given me fiercely.

To love a woman in a world that said I must not will never be anything but a revolution.

And when I kiss her, trust me, entire galaxies are mine.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“In this life, I have squeezed myself into more boxes than I can count. Of all of these, the smallest are the ones I have built for myself.⁣⠀”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“This life? It is yours. Anyone who suggests that it is not or that it should not be is not here for you. You get to decide how you want to live it, what you want to call it, how and when and why you want to change it. No matter how many times you shift, no matter how often you adjust, no matter the experimentation or the wild exploration, no matter how many times you've been lost or how many times you've been found or any of the missteps you took along the way. Be willing to reinvent yourself fiercely, relentlessly, endlessly in the face of their anger, in response to their fear, in righteous rebellion. A holy(r)evolution. Take to the streets if you wish. Paint the protest sign with your own name. You are not required to stay who you were, or who you are, or even who you will be. You were made for metamorphosis. Designed for course correction. Built for shifting trajectories and smashing paradigms. You are here to become. And nobody can write the terms of your contract but you.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“Life can sometimes seem an endless experience in compromise, in bending into the break, in the give + take + lead + follow of interconnection. This is all so good and necessary to building a community of souls, trusting that we are not in this world on our own, learning the power of leaning into the collective good. And yet. There are spaces and places and ideals in my life that are not open to discussion, not up for negotiation, not an invitation to debate or argue or compromise. Leading this list are the terms of my own freedom, the ways I have learned to know and name my ownership of this one life I am living. I have come to name this sense of ownership my personal sovereignty. It is mine and mine alone. The container of this sovereignty—what it includes and leaves behind, the way it moves through the world, how it dances with others—all of this may change a million times over, but that is mine and mine alone to decide.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“Not being able to show one's true self or having to try to be what others want you to be can be very suffocating, regardless of the issue.”
― Noeul Nuttarat Tangwai