Aidan

“The entire premise of this book is that language has the power to define our experiences, and there’s no better example of this than anxiety and excitement. Anxiety and excitement feel the same, but how we interpret and label them can determine how we experience them.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“I’ll say it again, because it bears repeating: the resistance to memoirs about trauma is always in part—and often nothing but—a resistance to movements for social justice.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“Those who benefit from the inequities of our society resist the stories of people whose suffering is in large part owed to the structures of our society. They do not want to have to change. We see this in a thousand forms of white fragility, male fragility, and transphobic and homophobic tantrums protesting the ground gained by trans and queer storytellers.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“The resistance to memoirs about trauma is in many respects a reiteration of the classic role of perpetrator: to deny, discredit, and dismiss victims in order to avoid being implicated or losing power. Anyone who writes the story of their individual trauma, and especially those of identities that have been historically oppressed and abused, is subject to the retraumatization by ongoing perpetrators: the patriarchal, white supremacist, colonizing nation(s) in which they must live and learn to heal.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative