“There is a girl on fire a woman choking a body walking into the ocean and they all have my face. They all have my heart because I give that away so easily.”

Brown girls are not band aids for your pain.

I am just a bunch of bad decisions glued together.

You look most like your father when you smile. It’s your ultimate betrayal.

You are a multiple choice exam and I have circled all the wrong answers.

Heaven is not something you need to die to get to.

Black don’t crack: It does bruise, though. It does rupture into a new sky.

I wish I was as good at love as I am at falling apart.

I am always becoming a new tragedy. Trading one torture for another. Forever versatile in this becoming.

Shame is what happens when you learn self love through people who are difficult to forgive.

Sometimes I open my mouth and my mother comes out.

Its okay if all you did this year was survive.

Self Love is just me loving you in reverse.

The last person I adored made me cry and then tenderly wiped the tears off my face. It was the only lesson that taught me; you can love someone and still do horrible, cruel things to them.

We romanticize trauma so much that we have stopped trying to prevent it and started smiling at all the scars it leaves.

Healing can look a lot like violence.

Can we just pretend we are wanted?

There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.

I think the quality of sexiness comes from within. It is something that is in you or it isn’t and it really doesn’t have much to do with breasts or thighs or the pout of your lips.

I look like people that walk down the street. I don’t have perfect boobs, I don’t have zero cellulite – of course I don’t – and I’m curvy. If that is something that makes women feel empowered in any way, that’s great.

I don’t have parts of my body that I hate or would like to trade for somebody else’s or wish I could surgically adjust into some fantasy version of what they are.

I still don’t believe this craziness for being skinny, but I eat sensibly and I don’t stuff down chocolate biscuits.

In seeing wounds heal, I saw a body that loved itself enough to not let it hurt forever. And I learned. – my body knew self love before I did.

I accept my body. I accept how I am and make the best of what I am given.

I feel very strongly that curves are natural, womanly and real. I shall continue to hope that women are able to believe in themselves for who they are inside, and not feel under such incredible pressure to be unnaturally thin.