Justine

“I offer my dreams as a source of love to the world. In their fulfillment I will bring a message of light to all that I touch.”
― Sonia Choquette, Your Heart's Desire: Instructions for Creating the Life You Really Want

“People always say that it’s good to feel your feelings, that if you don’t feel them now, they’ll come out later. But throughout this crisis, I have yet to see hers come out. And who’s to say what it means to handle something well? Here I am with a full emotional range, and I’m paralyzed. Meanwhile, my mother is staying very busy with her business, the house, financial stuff. Some days I think she’s headed for a fall. Most days, I feel like she’s handling this well—and that her lack of an emotional response is proof that something is wrong with me. “Oh my god!” she says. “Oh no!” “What’s wrong?!” “Nothing,” she says. “I just remembered. I have to go to Home Depot and get a hose.”
― Melissa Broder, Death Valley

“or furniture I wanted to buy or even people I was attracted to (well, I’m referring to those things a little) but, rather, a sensation I can only describe as the ache of not being there”
― Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion

“In certain moments—driving on the 405 freeway through the brown, flower-flecked hills of the Sepulveda Pass; preparing to dive into the ginlike waters of the pool at the Rosebowl Aquatic Center, where the San Gabriel Valley heat roils off the concrete and my skin gets too tan and my hair bleaches out and some part of me morphs back into the sun-dried child I was in the very beginning—I have to ask myself why it all feels so familiar. Is it a sign that I have truly transformed, that I have become not just a Californian but, in a general sense, Californian? Or is it simply a resetting of the bones of the Californian I’ve always been?”
― Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion