Simona > Recent Status Updates

“I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes.”

“I want to meet you in every place I ever loved.”

“...she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either)...”

“…people suffer when their boundaries are blurred…. In the final analysis, disease itself is a boundary question. When we look at the research that predicts who is likely to become ill, we find that the people at greatest risk are those who experienced the most severe boundary invasions before they were able to construct an autonomous sense of self.”

“Illness not only has a history but also tells a history. It is a culmination of a lifelong history of struggle for self.”

“Do I live my life, according to my own deepest truths, or in order to fulfill someone else’s expectations? How much of what I have believed and done is actually my own and how much has been in service to a self-image I originally created in the belief it was necessary to please my parents?”

“If we would heal, it is essential to begin the painfully incremental task of reversing the biology of belief we adopted very early in life.”

“What matters are the child’s unconscious perceptions, based on his innermost interpretations of his interactions with the world. Those interpretations, embedded at the cellular level, constitute the biology of belief that governs so much of what we feel, what we do and how we react to events. A major contributor to the genesis of many diseases…is an overload of stress induced by unconscious beliefs.”

Where parenting fails to communicate unconditional acceptance to the child, it is because of the fact that the child receives the parents love not as the parent wishes, but as it is reflected through the parents personality. If the parent is stressed,harbors unresolved anxiety or is agitated by unmet emotional needs, the child is likely to find herself in situations of proximate abandonment regardless of intentions

“Even more universal is emotional deprivation… In other words, the angry child got into trouble and experienced rejection. The anger and the rejection had to be deflected inside, against the self, in order to preserve the attachment relationship with the parent. That, in turn, leads to the ‘strong feelings of inadequacy and a poor self-concept’ researchers have recognized in people with rheumatoid disease.”

“...maybe it’s that we... tend to flatten our parents, compressing them into the characters we need them to be. We reduce them to the sidekicks, the villains, the kooky court jesters of our life stories. In some cases, we do this because we have to. Because parents are capable of serious soul-crushing harm, and we must minimize that to survive. But in doing so, we forget they have life stories of their own.”

“Grief is an impossible meal, so we cut it up into little pieces, dress it in ritual, and take it like a pill.”

“I get tackled to the ground three times, landing harder and harder on my back and tailbone. I still can’t tackle well. Legal tackle means cheek to cheek, the side of your face on her butt. It means knowing how to fall forward, how to lose balance on purpose, how to drive something home.”

“I could pray, but here’s the truth: even if the gods are real, I don’t think they can liberate us.”

“I love how you skin fear and move through it. I love how you lean into grief and somehow use it to be even more alive. You’ve shifted my whole world, brought me light and company and a joy I forgot I could feel. I’m not letting a little distance get in the way of this.”

“You are so generous with your heart. You were like light. I couldn’t help but turn my face to you if I wanted to keep living.”

“I fought with almost everyone because I was slim and some suspicion of delicacy clung to me and it made boys aggressive, for whatever reason. Some people can’t see softness without wanting to hurt it.”

“I want everybody to get along, and I want to make them dessert.”

“Do you not see how dangerous that mindset is? Do you not think that treating the galaxy as if it is something to be endlessly used will always, always end in tragedy? You think you’ve broken the cycle. You haven’t. You’re in a less violent period of exact same cycle, and you don’t see it. And the line of what you find to be justifiable cause is going to keep slipping…”

“How convenient for you, to at last work with a species whose bodies are compatible with your bureaucracy. Our time in this galaxy is, as you have constantly reminded us, limited. We will no longer waste it on waiting for you to do what is right.”

“Because how do you comfort someone you resent? How do you show up for someone who didn’t show up for you? I didn’t know. All I did know was that I couldn’t hold my mother’s anger because I had no room for it, with all the space my own anger was taking up.”

“Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.”

"I think I covet permanence - but I wouldn't know what to do with it if I had it."

“Queer culture is slippery in precisely this way: the visible world is for straight, cisgender people, but the queer world courses through every secret crack in its facade.”

“I have lived so many lives through love.”

“We are not independent creatures in a vacuum – this I have known since my days of sharing food stamps and not calling the cops on the neighbors. Instead, we are constantly bumping up against one another… realizing what we love and who we are through someone else’s experience of them. And this, I think, is more than just tolerable – it’s a beautiful reminder that we need each other”

“ figure out what you love, specifically. In detail. Figure out what you want to keep. Figure out what you want to change. Otherwise, it’s not love. It’s clinging to the familiar - to the comfortable - and that’s a dangerous thing for us short-term thinkers to do. If you stay, stay because you want to, because you’ve found something here worth embodying, because you believe in it.”

“What was better— a constant safeness that never grew and never changed, or a life of reaching, building, striving, even though you knew you’d never be completely satisfied?”