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“Excuse me while I throw this down, I’m old and cranky and tired of hearing the idiocy repeated by people who ought to know better.

Real women do not have curves. Real women do not look like just one thing.

Real women have curves, and not. They are tall, and not. They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not. They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever.

Real women start their lives as baby girls. And as baby boys. And as babies of indeterminate biological sex whose bodies terrify their doctors and families into making all kinds of very sudden decisions.

Real women have big hands and small hands and long elegant fingers and short stubby fingers and manicures and broken nails with dirt under them.

Real women have armpit hair and leg hair and pubic hair and facial hair and chest hair and sexy moustaches and full, luxuriant beards. Real women have none of these things, spontaneously or as the result of intentional change. Real women are bald as eggs, by chance and by choice and by chemo. Real women have hair so long they can sit on it. Real women wear wigs and weaves and extensions and kufi and do-rags and hairnets and hijab and headscarves and hats and yarmulkes and textured rubber swim caps with the plastic flowers on the sides.

Real women wear high heels and skirts. Or not.

Real women are feminine and smell good and they are masculine and smell good and they are androgynous and smell good, except when they don’t smell so good, but that can be changed if desired because real women change stuff when they want to.

Real women have ovaries. Unless they don’t, and sometimes they don’t because they were born that way and sometimes they don’t because they had to have their ovaries removed. Real women have uteruses, unless they don’t, see above. Real women have vaginas and clitorises and XX sex chromosomes and high estrogen levels, they ovulate and menstruate and can get pregnant and have babies. Except sometimes not, for a rather spectacular array of reasons both spontaneous and induced.

Real women are fat. And thin. And both, and neither, and otherwise. Doesn’t make them any less real.

There is a phrase I wish I could engrave upon the hearts of every single person, everywhere in the world, and it is this sentence which comes from the genius lips of the grand and eloquent Mr. Glenn Marla: There is no wrong way to have a body.

I’m going to say it again because it’s important: There is no wrong way to have a body.

And if your moral compass points in any way, shape, or form to equality, you need to get this through your thick skull and stop with the “real women are like such-and-so” crap.

You are not the authority on what “real” human beings are, and who qualifies as “real” and on what basis. All human beings are real.

Yes, I know you’re tired of feeling disenfranchised. It is a tiresome and loathsome thing to be and to feel. But the tit-for-tat disenfranchisement of others is not going to solve that problem. Solidarity has to start somewhere and it might as well be with you and me.”

Worlds self-made and self-nourished are so full of ghosts and monsters.

Significance stares at me from everywhere, like a gigantic underlying ghostliness. Significance emerges out of dank alleys and sombre faces, leans out of the windows of strange houses. I am constantly reconstructing a pattern of something forever lost and which I cannot forget.

What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.

Your lies are not lies, Sabina. They are arrows flung out of your orbit by the strength of your fantasy. To nourish illusion. To destroy reality. I will help you: it is I who will invent lies for you and with them we will traverse the world.

At this moment, I suspect, because such is your nature, you would break into a run. So I would have to run after you, ploughing as if through water through the thick grey sand, dodging the branches, calling out: ‘Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory—speaking at the highest level—of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it.’

I felt weak, languid. As we walked down the street in the dying softness, I listened to his voice and tried to remember what it once made me feel. It seemed to me that I was simply very wearing of loving, that I was turning and resting in those who loved me. I tried to remember. How I let things die their slow seasonal deaths and cannot hasten any act of destruction. I cannot tell Henry I do not love him anymore. I do not [want to] believe that I do not love him anymore. […]

Whatever is reduced to tenderness ought better to die.

On November 8, 1933, [Dr. Otto] Rank asked me to give up my journal and I left it in his hands. He delivered me of my opium.

It was a bold stroke. It stunned me. It was a violation. A few moments ago, just before dark, in the park, I had sat writing in it, writing of the lies I would tell Rank to interset him. I feared he would not find me interesting enough, and I was going to dramatize my life. I had heard he only took cases which interested him. And I had confided to the diary the lies I intended to tell. And now he wanted to take possession of all my secrets.

I had carried the diary around for years when I visited Rene Allendy, and he never expressed any curiosity.

Dr. Rank saw how stunned I was and added: “If you carry it around and bring it here, it is because you want to give it, you want someone to read it. And it isn’t only your wish to have it read. It is your last defense against analysis. It is like a traffic island you want to stand on. If I am going to help you, I do not want you to have a traffic island from which you will survey the analysis, keep control of it. I don’t want you to analyze the analysis.”

There is a great continuity in my relations with people—in my devotions, rather. I fight hasty, casual, careless contacts. In this there is no trace of Mars, no love of interruption, war, action—just a patient, subterranean, delicate effort to destroy the solitude of human beings, a concern with details, with completeness.