Ted

“it's time to be curious about what lives in the ocean of you beyond the island of other people's needs. caregiver, are you curious? what if i told you: you don't need to heal others to heal yourself. you can just heal yourself. you do not need to give love to others to love yourself. you can just love yourself. within healer and helper, there is warrior, there is priestess, there is holy whore. who knows all the things you could be?”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“My name is Daphne.'
Daphne?
In that moment, it's as if I've peeled the skin away from the chest of a patient, revealing a beating heart. A boy could not say that name as if terrified the syllables will break in the mouth. A boy-born-boy could not recognize what I am.
Of course her name is Daphne.
I stand up straight, taking a step from the door; and then another, and another.
She's like me.”
― Andrew Joseph White, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“the queer archive is ‘fragile from fear and forgetting, too often written in whispers and saved in scraps.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out