maya

“People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“What looked like a snap to other people was actually an erosion of the surfaces that we built up for protection, and unfortunately people would rather dwell on the snap than the wearing.”
― Addie E. Citchens, Dominion

“When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned"

“Sometimes you have to say fuck it and throw your life down the drain just to see where you’ll come out on the other side. The most profound beauty emerges from the ashes of destruction. And by that, I mean that sometimes you have to burn your life to the ground in order to experience the life that is truly meant for you.”
― Julia Fox, Down the Drain