Calli

“True belonging is not passive. It's not the belonging that comes with just joining a group. It's not fitting in or pretending or selling out because it's safer. It's a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are. We want true belonging, but it takes tremendous courage to knowingly walk into hard moments.”
― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

“If you are able to extend grace to yourself to see yourself as the imperfect human that you are, full of the complicated feelings that accompany a loss, feelings that ebb and flow, you will be more able to extend it to others as well. When we refuse to offer ourselves grace and accept whatever we are experiencing, we make it harder to move through it, and we make it nearly impossible for others to effectively help us.
Grief is a tricky beast, and there is no such thing as grieving "perfectly." Be prepared to extend grace to those around you, but most importantly, you need to extend grace to yourself.”
― Marisa Renee Lee, Grief Is Love: Living with Loss

“The rallying cry Black Lives Matter is fundamentally rooted in an absence of love. I thought about how much I love being Black and how much grief, anxiety, and fear being Black sometimes brings.”
― Marisa Renee Lee, Grief Is Love: Living with Loss

“Here’s what I believe: 1. If you are offended or hurt when you hear Hillary Clinton or Maxine Waters called bitch, whore, or the c-word, you should be equally offended and hurt when you hear those same words used to describe Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway, or Theresa May. 2. If you felt belittled when Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables” then you should have felt equally concerned when Eric Trump said “Democrats aren’t even human.” 3. When the president of the United States calls women dogs or talks about grabbing pussy, we should get chills down our spine and resistance flowing through our veins. When people call the president of the United States a pig, we should reject that language regardless of our politics and demand discourse that doesn’t make people subhuman. 4. When we hear people referred to as animals or aliens, we should immediately wonder, “Is this an attempt to reduce someone’s humanity so we can get away with hurting them or denying them basic human rights?” 5. If you’re offended by a meme of Trump Photoshopped to look like Hitler, then you shouldn’t have Obama Photoshopped to look like the Joker on your Facebook feed. There is a line. It’s etched from dignity. And raging, fearful people from the right and left are crossing it at unprecedented rates every single day. We must never tolerate dehumanization—the primary instrument of violence that has been used in every genocide recorded throughout history.”
― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone