I was never going to be good enough, but I tried so hard. I tried to make myself better. I tried to make myself acceptable to someone who would never… - Roxane Gay

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I was never going to be good enough, but I tried so hard. I tried to make myself better. I tried to make myself acceptable to someone who would never find me acceptable but kept me around for reasons I cannot begin to make sense of. I stayed because they confirmed every terrible thing I already knew about myself. I stayed because I thought no one else would possibly tolerate someone as worthless as me. I stayed through infidelity and disrespect. I stayed until they no longer wanted me around.

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About Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay (born October 15, 1974) is an American writer, professor, editor, and commentator.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Roxanne Gay
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Additional quotes by Roxane Gay

These are gifted adolescent women who don’t get to be judged on their impressive talent: their bodies are already paramount to the work they want to do and it’s only going to get worse. At sixteen these students are being judged on their sexual attractiveness. Their talent is a gift, but it is not enough.

It's hard to be told to lighten up, because if you lighten up any more you're gonna float the fuck away. The problem is not that one of these things is happening, it's that they are all happening, concurrently and constantly.

Buying into the notion of not that bad made me incredibly hard on myself for not “getting over it” fast enough as the years passed and I was still carrying so much hurt, so many memories. Buying into this notion made me numb to bad experiences that weren’t as bad as the worst stories I heard. For years, I fostered wildly unrealistic expectations of the kinds of experiences worthy of suffering until very little was worthy of suffering. The surfaces of my empathy became calloused.

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