ReadBecca

“the way i grew up, violence was like the weather: a lightning strike, a monsoon, ferocious and tragic, yes, but also something to be expected. you prepared for it, you endured it. you picked up the pieces and moved on. so that’s what i did. and the fury that stayed with me wasn’t about the assailants, the abusers, the perpetrators. it was about everyone around me who watched and did nothing.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“a child who keeps secrets to survive becomes a soldier in their soul.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“you do not need to build a grand and glorious temple to love. your body is the temple to love.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“Our clothing becomes a part of our bodies, both reflecting and shaping our personalities and helping us fit into various social roles—or making it hard for us to do so. An obvious example of this is women’s clothing in the mid-1800s, which consisted of large full skirts, frills, and boned corsets. These outfits not only sent the message that women were decorative objects, valuable mainly for their beauty; they also made it impossible for women to move around easily or quickly and harder for them to perform many types of physical tasks, which in turn served as a visual “evidence” that women were less competent than men. Most women internalized the dress codes of the time and only felt comfortable in such clothing. This in turn led some to think of themselves as helpless and fundamentally decorative: their clothing determined their social roles and ultimately their sense of self.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History