Lauren

“Harmonee had this bizarre look-on-the-bright-side thing, which Mom called a “very pessimistic kind of optimism”: whenever anything bad happened, she said you have to be thankful something worse didn’t happen, and proceeded to imagine and list multiple worse-case scenarios.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“People talk about emotions as though they are stripes on a flag, distinct and tightly hemmed, but mine are always kind of a patchwork.”
― Abbi Waxman, Christa Comes Out of Her Shell

“It frustrated me that society was so determined to quantify grief, as if time could erase the potency of love. Or, on the other hand, how it dictated that grief for someone you knew fleetingly should be equally as fleeting. But while a mother who miscarries might not have ever had the chance to hold that child, they had plenty of time to love them, to dream and hope for them. And that means their grief is twofold—they’re not just grieving the child, but the life they never got to experience. Who are we to tell anyone their pain isn’t worthy?”
― Mikki Brammer, The Collected Regrets of Clover

“What you see is what you get,” these women said about themselves. For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces—each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.”
― Miranda July, All Fours