Status Updates From The Knockout Queen

“I turned myself into a flesh violin like all the others and placed myself on the marketplace, uncertain how to say the things I needed to say: I can't host, I have no car, I have no money, I have little experience and what experience I do have is weird and scary, I am a ball of nerves, I am terrified, no one knows who I really am, I think about killing myself daily, I like to read books, please don't murder me.”

“I got the sense that, even though he was overtly grateful for his life, he was also someone who found life's beauty inextricably mixed with sadness. He was devoutly Catholic, and it always seemed to me that this informed the development of his personality, the way he liked to clasp the hands of the staff as we said goodbye, as though the hands were the conduit through which blessings could be communicated.”

“It was then that I understood that these encounters were fundamentally about loneliness, flashes of intense intimacy so awkward and fragile that they had no place in real life. The men I met online were not secret initiates into a world I could take part in, but refugees from the world I already knew too well.”

“I wanted nothing to do with that fey boy who accepted himself, and it pains me now to wonder how my life would have gone had I been psychologically sound enough to have made friends with him and begun so much earlier the hard work of attempting to love myself. I probably would have really loved Glee.”