Home > Work > Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
61 " As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. "
― Lena Dunham , Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
62 " If we follow the Buddhist logic that we are becoming part of glory of the universe, one huge consciousness, well, that's just too much togetherness for my taste. I couldn't even do a group art project in second grade. How am I going to share understanding with the rest of the creation? If this proves to be the case, I'm too much of a loner for death, but I'm also scared of being lonely. Where does that leave me? "
63 " 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. 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. "
64 " She has a taste for unusual women, with strong noses and doll eyes and creative dispositions. "
65 " Later in the summer your grandfather dies, and you’re secretly glad. You have a place to put all your sorrow now, one that people will understand. "
66 " I should stop apologizing for being overly analytical about this, even though I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am. I do what I can that isn’t heroin to modify it but I was born as anxious and obsessive as any incredibly gorgeous child ever could be.) "
67 " Family first. Work second. Revenge third. "
68 " It’s become horribly and offensively popular to say that someone is on the autism spectrum, so all I’ll say is his inability to notice when I was crying had to be some kind of pathology. "
69 " The anxiety that has followed me through my life like a bad friend had reappeared with a vengeance and taken a brand-new form... I didn't know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do. "
70 " 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... But I also consider being female such a unique gift, such a sacred joy, in ways that run so deep I can’t articulate them. It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it. "
71 " D. J. Tanner called and she wants her wardrobe back so it can be included in a museum retrospective about the prime years of Full House. "
72 " If someone doesn’t answer your email within six hours, it means they hate you. "
73 " But that isn’t how it works. 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. "
74 " 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 and focusing on your mission. "
75 " She asks me my worst quality, and I say I can be very self-involved. She says hers is that she gets lost in the world of her work and can't find her way back out again. "
76 " Let this book take you to the stars and beyond. "
77 " It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it. "
78 " I find the term “girl crush” slightly homophobic, as if I need to make it clear that my crush on another woman is not at all sexual but, rather, mild and adorable, much like … a girl. "
79 " I've always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for. When I was little, my mother would come home from a party, her hair cool from the wind, her perfume almost gone, and her lips a faded red, and she would coo at me "You're still awake! Hiiii." And I'd think how beautiful she was and how I always wanted to remember her stepping out of the elevator in her pea-green wool coat, thirty-nine years old, just like that. "
80 " You can’t draw blood from a stone, "