I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home

A great lesson: When someone tells you not to bother dreaming, they’re not on your side.

I cannot alter my basic truths, where I came from, who I am. But I can rearrange their importance in my life. I can alter the hierarchy. I can choose which needs are in charge. What is running the show emotionally. That is perhaps the only thing I can control.

I loved feeling like I could.

Eventually, my brain goes on strike. My brain says: You need to feel better about yourself. You need to put yourself in a situation where you can succeed more days than not, and the times you feel most successful are when you are sitting quietly at your desk, doing your work, writing your books, contemplating your characters, thinking about the why

I felt transformed: I was not just the observer, I was the doer.

I could still feel the release of this weight I had carried for so long—forever? No. Not forever. Years, though. But I would be someone else now.

Sometimes we make art in the moment in relation to a trauma, when we need to make art about it in retrospect instead.

I had been hiding myself, even though I was living a much more public existence.

If you choose this life, if you choose to be this way, you will get the bare minimum. An implication that I deserved only that. Ah, the impregnability of capitalism.