Jessica Knoll

Moving on doesn’t mean you don’t talk about it. Or hurt about it. It’s always going to hurt.

All my life, I’ve found it difficult to advocate for myself, to ask for what I want. I fear burdening people so much.

My favorite strategy is to feign inferiority and encourage my enemy’s arrogance.

Sometimes I feel like a windup doll, like I have to reach behind and turn my golden key to produce a greeting, a laugh, whatever the socially acceptable reaction should be.

There is something about seeing someone from behind, something about the way people walk away, that I've always found unnervingly intimate. Maybe it's because the back of the body isn't on guard the way the front is - the slouch of the shoulders and the flex in the back muscles, that's the most honest you'll ever see a person.

By the end of it all I just assumed no one ever told the truth, and that was when I started lying too.

But faith doesn’t mean that to me anymore. Now it means someone seeing something in you that you don’t, and not giving up until you see it too.