If life were a ship, I was standing at the back, focused on the churning waters of the past. Who gives a shit what you do if all that matters is what happened yesterday and making yourself feel better because yesterday was hard?

I love the Fab Five: Antoni, Jonathan, Karamo, Bobby, and Tan. I love the whole concept of the show Queer Eye: go into someone’s life who is struggling and, in a week, overhaul whatever is causing major problems: their house, their body, their relationships, and, always, their sense of self-worth.

Listening to your own voice is such a generous gift you can give to both yourself and the world.

If change were easy it would be called a candy bar. Change can be terrifying. Walk around your house with your eyes closed for fifteen minutes. Suddenly this safe space is so dangerous! Now walk around your life with no idea who you really are if you aren’t the spouse and job and friends that make you sick. You may feel like you are dying, and that’s because you are, or at least the bound, half-alive part of you is.

Because to truly love someone, I think, also involves the luxury of hate, of fury, of anger, of disappointment, of honesty.

I think writer’s block is an energetic thing that indicates a really good story is banging at the door. 

Why do you write?

If there is money, and there is, for people to adopt children torn without consent from their parents, there is money to fund search and reunion.

When people read you things they pulled from the well of themselves, you have swum in the waters of the holy, and nothing is ever the same.

I have been doing more Write or Die sessions lately and I am noticing a theme. It’s like the people I work with all hold a firefly in their fisted hand, and they are unwilling to let the light shine.

What if part of being born from and into trauma is the opportunity to leap from one track, one life, to another? One of our choosing?

I’ve been trying to get my heart to open. It’s like trying to get a walnut out of a shell that is slammed shut.