Sammi

“I sometimes avoid reading a news story when the victim is Asian, because I don't want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention. I don't want to care that no one else cares. Because I don't want to be left stranded in my rage.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“Something I find incredibly boring [..] is everyone's conviction that love is different for them. Somehow harder. Do you know what I mean? I just don't think it's hard. It's just another way of thinking you're special, the way everyone does when they're a teenager. You think you aren't able to love, except that of course you are. You think you aren't able to love correctly or the same as everyone else, except that of course you are, you just haven't had a chance to do it yet.

You are not special, you're just waiting.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“Instead of avoiding processing by leaping into the next project, Sam got ambitious about, well, peace... She mourned the all-hands-on-deck, everyone's emergency contact, always hustling version of herself, that she knew was not coming back. "So I mourned for a couple days - I mourned my youth, I mourned my innocence, I mourned everything"...
That change in identity; changing as circumstances change, rather than clinging to a fixed goal that no longer feels true, can feel like racing a ghost of yourself. My ghost self, my former self, was faster, sharper, and willing to do anything. She said yes to everything and pleased everyone. She's who I see in the mirror sometimes when I say 'no I can't' or, 'no I won't.' Or when I wonder what happened to the girl who would prove herself a million times over to an audience of no one. And smile while she was doing it.”
― Rainesford Stauffer, All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive

“When I look at myself, it's a lot of 'where is your own ambition coming from?'. And the answer is, self-loathing, and trying to earn a self that I could tolerate. Writing it down now, it feels a bit like I stumbled out of the confessional and into a crowded room. Handing over a secret everyone would have been more comfortable I keep to myself. But that was perhaps the worst slow burn realization. That self loathing could actually be productive. I internalized the belief that the more anxious I was, the faster I'd work. The worse I felt about myself, the harder I'd strive to make my work good. I strove, really, as a means of separating from myself. The worst of it is, is I couldn't exactly define what I loathed.”
― Rainesford Stauffer, All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive