part one.

I’m realizing that what scares and amazes me most is that I have a profound capacity to love one person.

Is this what Spinoza means when he says happiness is someone’s greater power adding to mine?

It’s so weird how love is so powerful and no one can prove it exists. All the time spent trying to prove the things that are, but the real things are what aren’t.

I was a girl thinking the suffering gave me some identity. I think I know what becoming a woman means now. It’s a very personal thing. It’s all very inward, like a hidden doorway behind a restaurant, to a speakeasy where everyone else is going to meet later, away from the screens, where things are realer.

it’s some fucking powerful emotional leadership.

part two.

I think part of being a career-girl is that the feeling of hating who you’ve become is just the patriarchy sweating or vomiting out of your system. You don’t quite know if it’s that or if it’s genuinely the unhealthy kind.

It’s weird that the reason I disqualified myself as a writer is because I didn’t feel like my words could provide comfort (I couldn’t write it because I didn’t have it). I wonder if male writers let that block them. If I could just be myself I would say the horrible things that were true.

I think every woman feels rape in their hearts at one point. By a man who just wants to prove he can, because he can, or at least he used to be able to, and he’s desperate that he might not ever be able to feel that free-flowing power again. I’ve come so far from feeling the bottom end of that power struggle. Back then, I had no money, no education, no skills, no friends, no courage. Now I have a life where I genuinely don’t want to go out of my way to get married or have kids or do anything with a man.

I sometimes want to go back and find everything I lost, circa early 20s. I entertained the idea it could be a boy thing. Like maybe I was sad because of a boy and I need to get him back, whoever it is I can’t admit to having feelings for. Did a Nobel laureate ever think that about her life?

What had always given me joy was my ambition. Everything changes but that doesn’t. You can rely on my confidence. My life is summed up as: alot of things change but not my ambition. I feel it on a spiritual level, it’s my strength.