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I have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession.

Melissa Febos

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Melissa Febos
Age: 44
Born: 1980
Born: September 28
Journalist
Writer
Secrecy
Confession
Replaced
Instinct

More quotes by Melissa Febos

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You can turn off the song the way you cannot the actual experience.
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All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.
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I do believe that we all have these stories inside of us, these scars that we compulsive worry as we do wounds, and that drive for redemption, to change the story or resolve it, governs a lot of what we do in love. We are irresistibly drawn to opportunities to reenact those traumas out of a desire to heal, not to punish ourselves.
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Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.
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Being celibate was so wonderful. It taught me a lot about love, but even more about my own self outside of love. I'd never met myself out of love before, really.
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I have always trusted writers, books, thinkers, psychologists in figuring things out. Maybe because they don't know me, so they are always honest, if that makes sense. Their wisdom and counsel are always unconditional.
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I always wished I could go to confession. I was so full of things I couldn't name and had an instinct to hide. I felt burdened by the loneliness of my interior life. I wanted some container that I could empty myself into, some ear that would never be shocked, even if it offered me some kind of penance.
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I think that's the job of the writer, right? Not to introduce new ideas or feelings, but to name the ones we know most intimately but are afraid of speaking, or don't have the words. That's what I find most powerful anyway.
Melissa Febos
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I am secretive. Always have been. And one way that secrecy manifested in my early life was that I was adept at juggling multiple social realities: I could get by no problem in many social arenas (including that of high school), but also felt alienated and totally uninspired by everything that happened there.
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Children's stories force logic upon the gruesome facts of our lives. They mirror our troubles and submit them to a chain of causality.
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Our lives are a long series of acquiring and then sloughing narratives.
Melissa Febos
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When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, Novels, and she said, You should be writing them then. Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.
Melissa Febos
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Fiction stymies me with its possibility. I can't see the bottom and I freeze, cling to the side, or just choke. In nonfiction, particularly that which takes personal narrative for its primary topic, I have a finite space and a finite amount of material. I can't fabricate material, I can only shape and burrow into it.
Melissa Febos
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I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.
Melissa Febos
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I can still discern people's weaknesses, but it doesn't make me want to exploit them it makes me want to hug them.
Melissa Febos
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The frustration of being marginalized often gets misdirected at the most visible members of one's own community, because they are more accessible than the real agents of marginalization.
Melissa Febos
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Letting go of the cozy stories you've been carrying around is devastating. But there's more room for new stuff after you do it.
Melissa Febos
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The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.
Melissa Febos
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I'm always writing to a younger version of myself, or a young woman who is like I was. I want that girl to know that I really existed and that it all went down that way.
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New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light.
Melissa Febos