How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone: A Memoir

When they introduce me at the UN, it feels more than polite, it feels fictious. The list of compliments. The clapping. I think other people need to believe that I can do good too.

Fred Moten wrote, “What if we could detach repair not only from restoration but also from the very idea of the original—not so that repair comes first but that it comes before. Then making and repair are inseparable, devoted to one another, suspended between and beside themselves.”[7]

“The process of making art,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity.”[2]

I know I can only be powerful if people are listening, and I must be powerful if I want to survive.

When you spend time calibrating for the mood and comfort of those around you, it’s like a radio that’s always on. When it turns off, emptiness.

when it made me ignore my strength because it wasn’t as valuable as my flexibility, I ignored so much of myself that what I considered acts of perseverance in fact left me with little to persevere for.

And the ability to disassociate is also what made me successful: Without my own emotion getting in the way, the audience could find room for their own response.

Sarah Schulman in Conflict Is Not Abuse. “If conflicted people were expected and encouraged to produce complex understandings of their relationships, then people could be expected to negotiate, instead of having to justify their pain through inflated charges of victimization. And it is in the best interest of us all to try to consciously move to th

Good stories, like photographs, freeze meaning; they turn memory into memorized lines.

Both of them helped me consider that the response to something broken isn’t a big resolution, it’s in the sweeping, baking, planting, building, and caring for the world we need to live in every day.