#identity

Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender is that, let's recognize that the word gender has scores of meaning built into it. It's an amalgamation of bodies, identities, and life experiences, subconscious urges, sensations, and behaviors, some of which develop organically, and others which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of saying that gender is any one single thing, let's start describing it as a holistic experience. ↗

— Kate Bornstein

#gender-identity #transgender #experience

Depression is about anger, it is about anxiety, it is about character and heredity. But it is also about something that is in its way quite unique. It is the illness of identity, it is the illness of those who do not know where they fit, who lose faith in the myths they have so painstakenly created for themselves. [...] It is a plague - especially if you add in its various forms of expression, like alcoholism, anorexia, bulimia, drug addiction, compulsive behaviour of one kind or another. They're all the same things: attempts to avoid disappearance, or nothingness, or chaos. ↗

— Tim Lott

#depression #faith #identity #anger

We’re afraid the others will think we’re agringadas because we don’t speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be “real” Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos. There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience. ↗

— Gloria E. Anzaldúa

#chicano #chicanos #identity #internalized-racism #experience

You can't change who you are, can you? That would require changing the people who made you along the way. That would mean discrediting everything they ever gave you. ↗

— Rose Christo

#wisdom #change

Being socialized female and spending my life "othered" by this world gives me a unique perspective. In the past, this has felt like shit. In the present, it feels pretty good. In the future I hope somebody loves me enough to watch me age ungracefully. ↗

— Harvey Katz

#identity #age

The possibility of saying anything about a thing rests on the assumption that it preserves its identity, or continues to be the same thing in the respect described, that it will behave in future situations as it has in past. ↗

— Frank Knight

#anything #assumption #behave #continues #described

I can't give up my own identity. ↗

— Shirley MacLaine

#i #identity #my own #own #up

By dismantling the narrow politics of racial identity and selective self-interest, by going beyond 'black' and 'white,' we may construct new values, new institutions and new visions of an America beyond traditional racial categories and racial oppression. ↗

— Manning Marable

#beyond #black #categories #construct #dismantling

I've wanted to win at everything, every day, since I was a kid. And time doesn't change a person, it just helps you get a handle on who you are. Even at age 41, I still hate losing--I'm just more gracious about it. I'm also aware that setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams. ↗

— Dara Torres

#ambition #dreams #experience #goals #identity

These stories are important to me, not because they happen to be about South Asians, but because they’re circling around a certain strain of loneliness that goes deeper than cultural dissonance, that has to do with the yearning to connect with someone else, or with some unreachable vision of home. ↗

— Tania James

#home