“Why am I trying to be a part of a canon that literally does not even understand me?”

“That’s when I realized, “Oh this is the project of the book. I’m remaking my consciousness. This isn’t what I signed up for.” And of course it is— I’m the one holding the clipboard. But this is not what I thought it was going to be.”

“Injury doesn’t always show up the way you think it will. Family doesn’t manifest or show up the way you think it will— in my life, it hasn’t.”

“I think that writers could feel much less lonely in what is already a fairly lonely vocation, if there were more conversations about this.”

“Life is lived on the ground, and mostly it doesn’t make sense, and mostly it’s messy, and mostly it’s mundane. I want to hold something of life inside of the things that I make.”

“I think it has helped to talk about these things. To— to make peace with it. To make amends with it.”

“It’s not that I don’t ever write harshly now, or ever use humor. But I always want first to love something— in the world and in my work. I wish first to love something.”

“I realized, Oh, I would do anything to get out of sadness. Whether it be turning to rage, or turning to paranoia, or anything else. Any kind of distraction.”

“The beginning of my illness felt less like a single moment of bifurcation than a series of small fractures.”

“My first thought was, NO. I thought, I don’t like this idea of “a threshold.” I realized it’s just like because on some level I feel like I’m a very resistant personality.”

“I thought “She’ll be SO ANGRY that she died!” Dare I borrow some of her mannerisms?”

“I don’t think books are stable objects, because I don’t think your brain is a stable object.”

“We would always go to see the body, and my mother would say ‘Ugh, she doesn’t look like herself.’”

There was a lot of dancing to get through that time. I was thinking about this last night… Why do all this if you can’t go sing and dance with your friends?”

“Anxiety, I think, is ecstatic. Being pushed to the limit. There have been times when I know my body can’t go anymore— and yet it is?”

“There was no other place I could go for healing or the sort of answers I was looking for than my first home.”

“I didn’t want to speak in a way that was operatic, I wanted to have a conversation. I wanted to talk instead of sing.”

“I had no conception of what a life after 30 could look like because I’d never imagined it. I’d always existed with the fear that I would die before then. “

“It felt like being on a space shuttle or being at sea. I’ve never been in a space in the hospital that felt so cordoned from the usual power currents in the hospital. It really felt like a space in which we were learning together on a new shore.”

“I can see her sometimes in the mirror and it's really stunning. Sometimes I'm grateful for it, but other time I also think, Well where am I at actually, and what part of this body is me anymore?”