Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.

You will find,” she says, “that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken.

You've learned a new rule and it's simple: don't put yourself in situations you'd like to run away from.

The end never comes when you think it will. It's always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left.

It's not brave to do something that doesn't scare you.

I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe. There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it.

There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman.

Respect isn’t something you command through intimidation and intellectual bullying. It’s something you build through a long life of treating people how you want to be treated

I have been envious of male characteristics, if not the men themselves. I'm jealous of the ease with which they seem to inhabit their professional pursuits: the lack of apologizing, of bending over backward to make sure the people around them are comfortable with what they're trying to do. The fact that they are so often free of the people-pleasing instincts I have considered to be a curse of my female existence.

Throughout the day I often ask myself, Could I fall asleep right now? and the answer is always a resounding yes.

But I also think when we embark on intimate relationships, we make a basic human promise to be decent, to hold a flattering mirror up to each other, to be respectful as we explore each other.

Life is long, people change, I would never be foolish enough to think otherwise. But no matter what, nothing can ever be as it was. Everything has changed in a way that sounds trite and borderline offensive when recounted over coffee. I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe.

I would be a horrible girlfriend at this point in my life, because I’m both needy and unavailable.

I didn't know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do. At the moments it should logically strike, I am fit as a fiddle. On a lazy afternoon, I am seized by a cold dread.

But ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put.

It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.

I didn't drink in the essence of the classroom. I didn't take legible notes or dance all night. I thought I would marry my boyfriend and grow old and sick of him. I thought I would keep my friends, and we'd make different, new memories. None of that happened. Better things happened.

I deserved kisses. I deserved to be treated like a piece of meat but also respected for my intellect.

I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women that I regret having argued with, women I sought to impress, to understand, was tortured by. Women I wish to see again, to see them smile and laugh and say, It was all as it should have been.

I’ve always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for.

Once, my little sister was walking down the street in her thick black glasses, and a homeless man muttered, “Talk nerdy to me.

Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day.… —GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary

I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am.

Barbie’s disfigured. It’s fine to play with her just as long as you keep that in mind.

The end never comes when you think it will. It’s always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left.

The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action. It makes me want to take a nap.