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It has been my experience that the people I judge most harshly are the ones in whom I recognize some part of myself.
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Melissa Febos
#People
#Judging
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New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light.
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Melissa Febos
#New York
#Night
#Bridges
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The frustration of being marginalized often gets misdirected at the most visible members of one's own community, because they are more accessible than the real agents of marginalization.
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Melissa Febos
#Real
#Frustration
#Community
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Abandonment by a lover won't kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.
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Melissa Febos
#Lovers
#Remember
#Remember When
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I was in the fantasy. I was selling myself on the fantasy as I was doing it. It never occurred to me. I did take notes, but just because I am a writer. I've been a writer since I was five. You don't have any sort of outlandish, shocking, extraordinary, horrifying experience without writing it down, because I know and knew that you forget things. No matter how outrageous and amazing and extraordinary and seemingly unforgettable an experience is, it's kind of like a dream. It will erode inevitably, for me.
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Melissa Febos
#Dream
#Writing
#Erode
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I do believe that we all have these stories inside of us, these scars that we compulsive worry as we do wounds, and that drive for redemption, to change the story or resolve it, governs a lot of what we do in love. We are irresistibly drawn to opportunities to reenact those traumas out of a desire to heal, not to punish ourselves.
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Melissa Febos
#Believe
#Opportunity
#Worry
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Anyone who makes a life of what they love is a hero to me, and it's important for those people to be visible in every kind of life, every kind of love, every kind of work.
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Melissa Febos
#Hero
#Love Is
#People
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I could not kick heroin to save my life, literally, until I started telling my secrets. It was some of the clearest evidence I've ever found of anything. It was the only immediate change in behavior I've ever undergone. I told the most frightening truths, and I was free.
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Melissa Febos
#Secret
#Heroin
#Behavior
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Fiction stymies me with its possibility. I can't see the bottom and I freeze, cling to the side, or just choke. In nonfiction, particularly that which takes personal narrative for its primary topic, I have a finite space and a finite amount of material. I can't fabricate material, I can only shape and burrow into it.
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Melissa Febos
#Space
#Fiction
#Shapes
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I didn't know enough as a writer to understand why I needed to do this, but I understood in a very gut way that I could not entertain those thoughts of pleasing people and write this book - that it would be a very different book. Without really sort of investigating that instinct, which I'm glad for, I just made a conscious decision to put blinders on and not think about anything and put it all in. And I did. I put everything in. I had to look at the whole picture to see what I needed.
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Melissa Febos
#Book
#Writing
#Thinking
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Being a dominatrix, sticking my foot up people's asses for money, necessitated that I divorce myself from any sort of objective perspective on what I was doing. In order to think about things as a writer you have to objectify your experience. I couldn't have been enacting that experience if I was objectifying it.
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Melissa Febos
#Divorce
#Thinking
#Order
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I can still discern people's weaknesses, but it doesn't make me want to exploit them; it makes me want to hug them.
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Melissa Febos
#People
#Hug
#Weakness
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You don't have to write like David Foster Wallace or James Baldwin or Maggie Nelson - indeed, you shouldn't. Those writers are doing it better than you ever could.
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Melissa Febos
#Writing
#Maggie
#Nelson
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Sometimes I see my students, especially the ones with a gift for the lyrical, reaching far outside the realm of their own experience for language and images. I understand this impulse. We think, in the beginning, that striking exotic words together will create something entirely new. That we must be worldly in our vocabulary. We idolize the styles of other writers and don't trust or perhaps yet know our own.
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Melissa Febos
#Thinking
#Vocabulary
#Style
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Torch songs are confessions. They are an expression of feeling that cannot be concealed or contained or minimized. They are marked by anguish, yes, but also by yielding.
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Melissa Febos
#Song
#Expression
#Feelings
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The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.
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Melissa Febos
#Secret
#Crafts
#Mediators
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I think that's the job of the writer, right? Not to introduce new ideas or feelings, but to name the ones we know most intimately but are afraid of speaking, or don't have the words. That's what I find most powerful anyway.
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Melissa Febos
#Powerful
#Thinking
#Feelings
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Letting go of the cozy stories you've been carrying around is devastating. But there's more room for new stuff after you do it.
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Melissa Febos
#Letting Go
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Being celibate was so wonderful. It taught me a lot about love, but even more about my own self outside of love. I'd never met myself out of love before, really.
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Melissa Febos
#Love Is
#Wonderful
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I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.
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Melissa Febos
#Beautiful
#One Thing
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Desperation precludes reflection. That is one of the reasons why smart people can get involved in very obviously unworkable relationships. Like addiction, that deep, Imago attachment is more powerful than logic, and in fact disables logic. So, any explanation or analysis or reflection on such a feeling is already many steps removed from the experience.
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Melissa Febos
#Powerful
#Smart
#Reflection
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I can only see right in front of me when I'm writing, you know? I never think of it as raw or personal or anything but where I'm at in the moment. But I can see it sort of after I finish.
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Melissa Febos
#Writing
#Thinking
#Moments
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Music isn't seeking to comment on the experience or transmit some finding about it - it is only seeking to express it. The vicarious experience is much more accessible. We all recognize the sound of that howling, because we all have a similar howling inside of us, however we heed it or hold it or muzzle it or repress it or live in bondage to it.
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Melissa Febos
#Muzzle
#Sound
#Bondage
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I think trauma gets a reductive treatment. We tend to think only violence or molestation or total abandonment qualify as "childhood trauma," but there are so many ruptures and disturbances in childhood that imprint themselves on us. Attachment begets trauma, in that broader sense, and so if we've ever been dependent on anyone, I think there is an Imago blueprint in us somewhere.
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Melissa Febos
#Thinking
#Attachment
#Childhood
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Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.
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Melissa Febos
#Smart
