A Quote by Karen Russell
When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub. I was also a fan of the 'shoe closet.' Reading felt thrilling and illicit and deeply private to me, and I felt vulnerable doing it in public.
Related Quotes
I haven't always felt it was okay to read romance novels. When I was younger, it embarrassed me to be seen with my books, but I've come out of the closet.
'Anna Karenina.' I read it in college. I was so engrossed that I couldn't stop reading it and neglected all my other studies. I would go to the library even on nice warm weekends and just lock myself up. I think that was the first time that I felt transformed by a book.
Change occurs when deeply felt private experiences are given public legitimacy.
I had to share a room with my sister, who is five and a half years older than I am. We didn't get along well, and I felt that I had no privacy. So books were my privacy, because no one could join me in a book, no one could comment on the action or make fun of it. I used to spend hours reading in the bathroom -- and we only had one bathroom in our small apartment!
I can't speak for other people, but for me, I feel like gone are the days that you need to come out of a closet. I never felt like I was in a closet. I never did. I always felt comfortable with who I am and the decisions I made.
I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.
To be honest, I felt more myself with that haircut. I felt bold, and it felt empowering because it was my choice. It felt sexy too. Maybe it was the bare neck, but for some reason I felt super-, supersexy.
I had been doing theater since I was a kid, so the stage really felt like home to me. It felt like the place where I trust myself the most in the world and felt the most confident.
I tried to be really tough when I was younger. I felt I had to stand up for myself. I never felt like I fit in.
And so, while the rest of the world went on unaware, drinking their coffee, reading the sports page, and picking up their dry cleaning, I leaned forward and kissed Dexter, making a choice that would change everything. Maybe somewhere there was a ripple, a bit of jump, some small shift in the universe, barely noticeable. I didn’t feel it then. I felt only him kissing me back, easing me into the sunlight as I lost myself in the taste of him and felt the world go on, just as it always had, all around us.
One thing I did was to create a Love Yourself List. I wrote down everything I like about myself, and put it on my bathroom mirror. Then I read it until I believed it. Any time I compared myself to others, and felt negative about myself, I'd go back to that list.
I feel like it's me singing back to myself as a younger person and saying have confidence in being a bit different. I really felt I didn't fit in. My dad was from the Caribbean, my mum was English, we lived in quite a white area but we were quite poor, but also quite brainy, and I was a really, really skinny child so I felt a bit awkward about all these things.
I was a lonely, frightened little fat kid who felt there was something deeply wrong with me because I didn't feel like I was the gender I'd been assigned. I felt there was something wrong with me, something sick and twisted inside me, something very very bad about me. And everything I read backed that up.
What it felt to me was like the dissolution of my idea of myself. I felt like separateness evaporated. I felt this tremendous sense of oneness. I'm quite an erratic thinker, quite an adrenalized person, but through meditation, I found this beautiful serenity and selfless connection. My tendency towards selfishness, I felt that kind of exposed as a superficial and pointless perspective to have. I felt very relaxed, a sense of oneness. I felt love.
I felt that as an actor I continued to excel and felt really comfortable and confident in myself that I wanted to at least give it a go and picture myself doing other things. It was testament to 'Emmerdale' that they gave me the confidence and creativity to pursue other challenges.
When I realized I was depressed, then I started reading up about it. When I read that one in four people are depressed, I felt that I'm not the only one. I also felt that how many people must be feeling suffocated to fight this battle all alone. I just wanted to reach out and tell them that even I'm like you, and it's okay if you feel like that.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist