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The Body Keeps th...
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— Sep 03, 2025 10:34AM

 
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“This feeling of sadness and ending is really common on sets. You get to know the people around you so intimately because you're around them more than you're around your own family. For a period of time. And then you aren't anymore. And little by little, you realize you start talking less and less to the people you thought you were so intimate with. Until you don't talk to them at all anymore. And it makes you wonder if you were ever really intimate with them in the first place or if it was all just a facade. If the connections were as temporary as the sets they were made on.

I don't like knowing people in the context of things. "Oh, that's the person I work out with. That's the person I'm in a book club with. That's the person I did that show with." Because once the context ends, so does the friendship.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“During the years I lived alone, even in my self-imposed solitude there had been a part of myself I was afraid of. I worked too much, as if it were the only thing, to diminishing returns. Left to my own devices, there was a streak of masochism in my single-minded, obsessive habits. I didn't exercise that much, but when I did, it was in gruesome marathons of overexertion. I didn't eat enough, and when I did, it was in wild, sobering feasts, remembering that I even had a body. I made myself sick. Unregulated, I would have eventually destroyed myself. Yet even knowing this didn't motivate me to change my ways.”
― Ling Ma

“I yearn to know the people I love deeply and intimately—without context, without boxes—and I yearn for them to know me that way, too.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“A boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a girl can understand her. When the doctor told me it was a girl, I thought, Now I will be understood.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

Ling  Ma
“All winter long, I had glimpsed his deeply set habits, his regimented schedule. When I left, he would eat a dinner of leftovers, then continue to work until sleep. Everything revolved, to a fault, around work, around his next book project. If I had lived alone, I would have turned out the same way. It is the thing I have been most afraid of happening, my strictness toward myself calcifying into a lifestyle, my traits ingrown so deeply that my oddness surfaces, apparent to all.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

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