Natalie > Recent Status Updates

“Trans is also like a hand. Sometimes its fingers are called precognition, the ability to see the future. Sometimes they’re postcognition, the ability to see the past—we have a guy who knows who killed John F. Kennedy, and it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald; it was, in fact, a woman. There’s telepathy, pyrokinesis, telempathy, and who knows how many others."

Who knew that better than I, who had presided over the death of my own body, seeing all I called human wither and die only to form an unbreakable chain which held me fast to this world yet made me forever its exile, a spector with a beating heart.

Vampires are killers. Predators whose all seeing eyes were meant to give them detachment. The ability to see human life in its entirety not with any mawkish sorrow but with a thrilling satisfaction in being the end of that life, in having a hand in the divine plan.

People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we’ve witnessed of man’s inhumanity to man, we simply can’t go on. Perseverance is impossible if we don’t permit ourselves to hope.

With the sun still in the east, all shadows slanted westward, as if yearning for that horizon over which the night had preceded them. And along the windless street, only my shadow moved.

Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn’t mean that you can easily rebuild it. The Chamber of Unreasonable Guilt is part of my mental architecture, and I doubt that I will ever be able to renovate that particular room in this strange castle that is me.

I’ve since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.

They have a hunger on them. They never stop taking. They mortgaged their souls away and now they eat and eat and eat and never know how to stop. He’d found a place where he fit in, with a nearby source of food, and he’d become a respected member of the community, and now he wanted to have a family because he didn’t know how to stop. He always wanted more. That knowledge opened a door inside her mind...

He shook her hand and then, one after the other, each of the women stood and apologized, and shook his hand, and simpered, and curtsied, and kissed his ring, while Patricia sat there, at first simmering with hot rage, then going cold.

“A reader lives many lives,” James Harris said. “The person who doesn’t read lives but one. But if you’re happy just doing what you’re told and reading what other people think you should read, then don’t let me stop you. I just find it sad.”

Courtroom justice is a game, with each side trying to win points inside carefully drawn boundaries, the rules of law and procedure. In the hands of the court,the narrative and nuance, the story of complex happening, tends to get lost. Featured instead are tiny pieces of truth; singular details, items of evidence, shards.

If I could forgive, it meant I was a strong, good person who could take responsibility for the path I had chosen for myself, and all the consequences that accompanied that choice. And it gave me the simple but powerful satisfaction of extending a kindness to another person in a tough spot.

What made me finally recognize the indifferent cruelty of my own past was sitting and talking and working with and knowing the people who suffered because of what people like me had done. None of these women rebuked me; most of them had been involved in the drug business themselves. Yet for the first time I really understood how my choices made me complicit in theirsuffering. I was the accomplice to their addiction.

The formal relationship enforced by the institution, is that one person's word means everything and the other's means almost nothing; one person can command the other to do just about anything, and refusal can result in total physical restraint. That fact is like a slap in the face.

The fashion column from the New York Times...coverng half the page were phographs of women of color every age, race, size and shape, all clad in brilliant orange...I stuck the clipping in my locker where everytime I opened it I was greeted by my dear friends handwritting and smiling faces of women with orange coats, hats, scarves and even baby carriages. Apparently orange was the new black.

Guidelines established by Congress in the 1980s required federal judges to impose set sentences for drug crimes, regardless of the specific circumstances of a case...drug offenses are the primary reason that the US prison population has ballooned since the 1980s to 2.5 million people, a nearly 300% increase. We now lock up 1 out of every 100 adults, more than any other country in the world.

I think it's bizarre and tragic how society pushes us to say we are what we are because of the job we do. The question "what do you do" really means what do they pay you for, as if that's your defining characteristic. Everything else is a "hobby." But those are also things you are and do. Just because you don't make money at it doesn't mean you're not doing it. It's as valid as going to the office, maybe more so.

Later I'd find out that other actresses had been warned what could happen when the studio head summoned you to a meeting. Completely unbeknownst to me, an industry newbie, this hideous beast had a long track record of preying on young women. Sadly it seemed everyone in Hollywood on the business side knew that if you got summoned to a meeting it was probably going to go differently than you expect.

Before I could retest they hired Neve Campbell, an actress with dark hair. I thought Oh, God. They're never going to hire me now because I have dark hair too. Those are the rules...because you know, you can only multiple females on screen if they have different hair colors, because otherwise, they think the audience is too stupid to tell them apart.

Starving made me feel a fuzzed kind of high. I remember thinking that at least I was superior to heroin addicts because I was high for free. Yeah, that's how you want to go around gathering your self esteem, from your superiority to heroin addicts.

I looked in the mirror again...wondered why before when I had been in another state I'd have things thrown at me, and here I was being anointed with instant popularity. I thought about it deeply and came to the conclusion that other human's reactions were useless to me. Ultimately it allowed me to cancel out what other people thought of me. Later on, when fame came, this deduction probably saved my sanity.

My life altered irrevocably the day I turned into a pixel, and beamed up to an orbiting satellite, beamed back down, blasted across living rooms, bedrooms, lives. My job was to take you away from your struggles for a while, to make ypu feel empathy, to make you feel at all. I took my job seriously.