Alex Richmond

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“I want to stop picking at life like it's a meal I don't want to eat, because I want to. I want to taste it all. I want life to be a feast, even if I have to eat it raw and bloody and burned some days. I will pick bones from my teeth. I will let the juice drip down my chin.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“I want to sleep, I think. I want to stop struggling and give in. I want to let the water take me and never have to be in my own company again. I want to stop dragging myself around, stop feeling the weight of every thought like they're stones pulling me farther and farther under, the seafloor and surface both out of sight. I want to stop feeling weak just because some days, I can hardly carry my heavy heart.

...

I want to belong to myself. I want to stop feeling worthless and pointless and hopeless and less, less, less than everyone else around me. I want to live, not just survive, and fill myself up with all the people who have loved me into this moment and this man. I want to believe I am good and kind and clever and worthy with as much conviction as I have believed the opposites. I want to stop picking at life like it's a meal I don't want to eat, because I want to. I want to taste it all. I want life to be a feast, even if I have to eat it raw and bloody and burned some days. I will pick bones from my teeth. I will let the juice drip down my chin.

...

I want to sleep, I think as the sea rocks me, my name on its breath and my body suspended in its gentle embrace.

But what I say is, "I want to wake up.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“It isn't the cold or the water or the sheer exhaustion that leaves me sagging, barely able to hold myself above the surface. It's the weight of the whole goddamn world. It's how hard it is to get out of bed. To believe people who say they love me. To believe my ideas have value or that I am capable of speaking them. The certainty that I'm silly and odd and wrong, a body and soul incorrectly assembled with all the right piece in the wrong places. The urge to scratch myself until I tear away my skin, to bleed myself dry and starve myself and look away, to say the cruelest things possible to myself before anyone else has a chance, to keep saying them until they're all I can hear. All the simple things that seem as easy as breathing for everyone else.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks