34 Quotes by Melissa Febos

I did not choose my female body. But I chose every image painted on it.

We find ways to comfort one another and to comfort ourselves. And comfort eases, but it does not erase. Until then, we keep reading.

Abandonment. What did that really mean? That I was left? That I had learned to leave my self. That I would retell the story until I found a different ending. Until I learned to stay.

The work of love is in building a shared story, and in letting the differences in perception rest easily aside one another.

How often we set this trap for ourselves. I had learned to act as if I were the person I wished to be: an ascetically self-sufficient woman, a woman without needs, a woman immune to disappointment. And I found or urged myself to be attracted to people whom only such a woman should love.

We really want the undoing of our earliest wounds and sometimes, in our attempts to correct the errors of our childhoods, we choose the exact thing we hope to avoid. We recognize a chance for love’s redemption and run toward it. We hope for a different ending.

When we observe how the world affects us and let our defenses rest, when we consider the context of our greater history, we have an opportunity to act from our higher selves and perceptions. Not reacting gives us the agency to change.