Michelle P

“When anxiety about the body runs deeply enough, adherence to the rules - don’t eat, keep the mouth shut, pack up the butane-powered curling iron, starve yourself half crazy - comes to feel voluntary, the mandates self-generated and freely embraced.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“Peckinpah gives the final shoot-out in which they all die a kind of orgasmic rush that releases all of us from the cinematic or, more accurately, the American fantasy that we will survive no matter what.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“No one is going to tell you who to marry, or what career to pursue, or how to cut your hair, and so you're thrown back on yourself. The freedom to chose, in other words, means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends to the construction of the self. This, I think, is the steady pulse of agitation behind an unsettled appetite, this wobbling, reaching anxiety, which craves relief, stalks it, hunts it down in tangible forms: Eat the cake, which will assuage some internal emptiness; buy that jacket, which will cloak you in an identity; call that man, who will define and give shape to your life.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“The tough part, of course, have to do with finding love, and then taking that sledgehammer and breaking out of the box long enough to hold onto it, which in itself is no small feat. That job involves naming desires, and it involves understanding what stands in its way, and it involves mustering the strength and courage and self-acceptance to smash through the constraints, consequences be damned. The key - the bridge to the shore - is agency, a feeling (almost always hard-won) that marries entitlement with power: I deserve to be filled becomes I can be filled, I can make it happen.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)