A Quote by Jazz Jennings

As I began to grow, my family thought my obsessive interest in girly things was just a normal developmental phase. — © Jazz Jennings
As I began to grow, my family thought my obsessive interest in girly things was just a normal developmental phase.
I'm not trying to have Jake Gyllenhaal's baby. I'm not a major fashionista. I'm not going through a lesbian phase. I'm just normal. I'm just really freakin' normal.
I didn't have a sense of how to dress. I still don't really, but, like, back then, I truly had no sense of how to dress because I wanted to be a tomboy - I thought I was a tomboy, but secretly wanted to be girly, but didn't know the first thing about making myself girly. So I ended up like wearing just like sweatpants to school with, like, long T-shirts that I got on family vacations. And it was just weird.
Normal! He thought. Normal! I don't want things to be normal. Normal is always being left out, never belonging.
I wanted to live in the suburbs and have a white picket fence and my own bedroom. And a staircase - I thought having a staircase meant that you were a normal family. I thought somehow if you could transplant us to the suburbs, we would become a normal family. But in retrospect, I'm so grateful I grew up in the Chelsea.
I was quite keen on silviculture, the growing of trees, and that was something I gave a lot of thought to. Maybe I could've gone in that direction. But it just so happened that while I was trying to make up my mind, I enrolled in art school, and there I began to develop my interest in music, parallel with my interest in the visual arts.
Everyone likes to stereotype things or write them off as not that serious or "this is just a phase," especially when you're that young. The music was never a phase, but the wardrobe was certainly a phase, so I think that may have overshadowed the music in the beginning, for sure. I was so outrageous.
When I'm home, I'm just mom. We're a normal, regular family doing normal, regular types of things.
"Girly" can be limiting if you're told it's the only option. I don't think the solution is to get rid of the girly stuff or decide it's oppressive and get mad at a singer or book for not ACCURATELY REPRESENTING ALL WOMEN. There just needs to be more options for girls who don't identify with the girly aesthetic, and can broaden the idea of what being a girl means. Similarly, there needs to be more of that stuff that can be aesthetically girly, but feminist in the actual message.
I didn't know anything was wrong with me when I was growing up. I thought everyone went to occupational and speech therapy, I thought these were common things. I thought I was quite normal until I went to school and someone told me it wasn't normal to have a disability.
I love a lot of things, and I'm pretty much obsessive about most things I do, whether it be gardening, or architecture, or music. I'd be an obsessive hairdresser.
Before God manifested Himself, when all things were still hidden in Him... He began by forming an imperceptible point; that was His own thought. With this thought He then began to construct a mysterious and holy form... the Universe.
I think, for every phase of your life, you take something out of it, you learn from it, you grow from it. You just have to try to take what you can from it and then move on to the next phase of your life to be better.
I just think my family is so normal, but no one wants to accept that. I find my family to be normal because there's an understanding of what every job entails. And it is a job. It's not this fantasy that Hollywood and movies are all glitter and stardust.
What I like about The Sims is that I don't have a normal life at all, so I play this game where these people have these really boring, mundane lives. It's fun. My Sims family is called the Cholly family. I don't know why I picked that name; it's kind of random. The teenage daughter is my favourite, because I just had her go through this Goth phase. She's really kind of nerdy and she just became a concert violinist, which is pretty huge for the family. And she got into private school. But she started wearing black lipstick and she dyed her hair purple. It's pretty huge.
Eventually I lost interest in trying to control my life, to make things happen in a way that I thought I wanted them to be. I began to practice surrendering to the universe and finding out what "it" wanted me to do.
My very first movie, 'Mary Poppins,' which I talk about, it just turned me into an obsessive, creative creature who had to sort of reply to the experience by drawing things, making things. It was like it forced - it made me into this obsessive, creative creature... I don't know any other way of putting it.
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