Annika

“I've forced my skin as thick as I am.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“I had a very happy childhood; I just wasn’t a very happy child.”
― Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

“The most insidious part of fame for April wasn't that other people dehumanized her; it was that she dehumanized herself. She came to see herself not as a person but as a tool.”
― Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

“Maya was the most effective talker I knew. It was like she wrote essays in her brain and then recited them verbatim. She once explained to me that she thought this was part of being Black in America. “Every black person who spends time with a lot of white people eventually ends up being asked to speak for every black person,” she told me one night after it was too late to still be talking, “and I hate that. It’s really stupid. And everyone gets to respond to that idiocy however they want. But my anxiety eventually made me extremely careful about everything I said, because of course I don’t represent capital-B Black People, but if people think I do, then I still feel a responsibility to try to do it well.”
― Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing