Realization

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  But the real story is actually quite clinical, which makes it that much more amazing. More than twenty years ago, in 1997, psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron, and a handful of colleagues from around the country published a paper with an innocuously dry title: “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings.” The procedure consisted of turning strangers into intimates in the laboratory by having them ask each other three sets of twelve questions. Each set became more probing and personal as they advanced. Set One included questions like, “For what in your life do you feel most grateful?” and, “Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?” Set Two goes a bit deeper: “Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?” and, “How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?” Set Three ups the ante again, with questions like, “Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met,” and, “Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.” But the protocol wasn’t meant to make people fall in love; instead, the thirty-six questions were simply meant to induce closeness and intimacy in a laboratory setting without the messiness of relationships that occur naturally in the wilds of humankind. The questions were meant to eliminate experimental variability, not induce wedding bells, though the study team got an inkling of the power of the thirty-six questions when two subjects who had met during the study pilot ended up getting married. Twenty years later, when the media caught wind of the questions, it treated them like they were a secret recipe for love. But the specific questions aren’t magic; instead, according to the researchers, it’s the act of “sustained, escalating, reciprocal, and personalistic” disclosure that sparks liking the other person and, indeed, sparks them to like us. The thirty-six questions lead to closeness through disclosure in fast-forward. Usually what we do when we meet someone new is small talk. Small talk is important—it’s the social niceties test-track of conversation—but by definition, it stays on the surface. It’s not about you; it’s about other things—traffic, the weather, that your co-worker Darren is out sick and there must be Something Going Around. Disclosure, however, is about you. Again, it means sharing bits of what you think and do and feel.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  A murmur rippled through the classroom. A girl in a pink T-shirt raised her hand. “That’s not true!” she said. “Popular kids are not friendly and nice. They’re mean and stuck-up.” Emboldened, other hands shot up: “Popular kids do start fights!” “They’re not kind or cooperative.” “They’re mean!” Parkhurst was puzzled. “But what I just said was based on the answers you gave us,” she said. Pink T-shirt Girl crossed her arms. “Then everyone who took your survey must have lied.” “Yeah!” echoed the class. Parkhurst thought for a moment. To be sure, she asked, “Do you like these kids?” What roared back was definitive: “No! We can’t stand them.” The kids couldn’t have known it, but in that moment they upended decades of research methodology. Back on campus, Parkhurst and Hopmeyer, who is now a researcher at Occidental College, pondered what the kids had said. The researchers had used a well-established method to measure popularity: Each kid got a list of others in their grade. Students were asked to circle the names of the three kids they liked best and the three kids they liked least. Then they were asked to do the same for those who were “kind,” “someone you can trust,” “cooperates,” “starts fights,” “easy to push around,” and “can’t take teasing.” It was a simple tally: You were popular if you got lots of “like most” votes and few “like least” votes. You were unpopular if you got lots of “like least” votes and few “like most” votes. Easy-peasy. But in the face of the kids’ feedback, Parkhurst and Hopmeyer reconsidered how to measure popularity. Maybe popularity wasn’t just a tally of likes and dislikes. They did another study, this time with one simple tweak: they added “popular” to the list. Then they crunched the numbers again. What they found changed the game. With the new method, being chosen as “popular” didn’t actually mean a kid was well liked; it meant they were dominant. The kids who were pegged as “popular” did get lots of “likes,” but they also got many “dislikes.” These alpha dogs and queen bees were liked by some, but mostly by other high-status kids. With others, they racked up the eye rolls. It’s easy to mistake being dominant for being liked, because dominant kids get a lot of attention. Their visibility is high. The shy among us despair, thinking, I’ll never be able to do that, or, That’s not me. But you don’t need to be someone you’re not. You don’t need to own the room to be liked. You don’t need to be a big shot, alpha, or self-important. True, honest, by-the-numbers popularity, as Parkhurst and her colleagues discovered, didn’t come from commanding attention or gaining deference. It didn’t even come from having the most confidence. Instead, the kids with the most “like most” votes and the fewest “like least” votes were those who were also rated as the package deal of kind, cooperative, and trustworthy.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  I now look back on my years as an adult male, remembering how I acted and interacted with others, but having some difficulty relating to the person I was back then. My life has very much been reshaped by the experiences of being and feeling physically female and having other people react to me as such. People often squabble over what defines a person as a woman or a man—whether it should be based on their chromosomes, assigned sex, genitals, or other factors—but such reductionist views deny our indisputably holistic gendered realities. For all of us, gender is first and foremost an individual experience, an amalgamation of our own unique combinations of gender inclinations, social interactions, body feelings, and lived experiences. While our experiential gender is often shaped or influenced by our perceived gender (the gender others assume us to be), one does not necessarily follow from the other. For example, I had lived and was treated as a man for many years, yet I always felt rather ambivalent about belonging to that class. Sometimes when my female friends would go off on a tirade about men in general, I would join in with them, not because I hated men or enjoyed making generalizations about people, but as a way of expressing the fact that I did not feel like a man. That identity never made sense to me given my constant struggles with gender dissonance, the persistent body feelings I experienced that informed me that there was something not quite right with my being physically male, and my personal history of consciously exploring and expressing my femaleness and femininity both in my imagination and in public. I gravitated toward genderqueer identities for most of the years that I was male-bodied—at different points, viewing myself as a boy who wanted to be a girl, a crossdresser, and bigendered—because they resonated with the myriad of gendered experiences that I had had up to that point. They captured the fact that, at the time, I really did feel like I was straddling both maleness and femaleness in some way. Genderqueer identities no longer resonate with my experiential gender in the same way. This is not to say that I now denounce them altogether, as I know firsthand just how rewarding and empowering it can be to see yourself as being outside, in between, or transcending both femaleness and maleness. It’s just that at this point in my life, I don’t feel genderqueer anymore. Experiencing the world (and my own body) as female makes the word “woman” feel like a far better fit for me now. Unfortunately, I have met a few genderqueeridentified people who have expressed suspicion or have been dismissive of the idea that someone could “transition” from genderqueer to unapologetically woman or man. Such assertions are clearly the product of gender entitlement, of these individuals projecting their own perspectives and beliefs onto other people’s gendered bodies, identities, and experiences.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Dingwall took the next train west, leaving me to put up hoardings in a month, after getting first of all the permission from the lot-owners. To cut a long story short, I got the permission from a hundred lot-owners in a week through my brother Willie, who as an estate agent knew them all. Then I made a contract with a little English carpenter and put the hoardings up and got the bills all posted three days before the date agreed upon. Hatherly’s Minstrels had a great fortnight and everyone was content. From that time on, I drew about fifty dollars a week as my profit from letting the hoardings, in spite of the slump. Suddenly Smith got a bad cold: Lawrence is nearly a thousand feet above sea-level and in winter can be as icy as the Pole. He began to cough, a nasty, little, dry hacking cough: I persuaded him to see a doctor and then to have a consultation, the result being that the specialists all diagnosed tuberculosis and recommended immediate change to the milder east. For some reason or other, I believe because an editorial post on the “Press” in Philadelphia was offered to him, he left Lawrence hastily and took up his residence in the Quaker City. His departure had notable results for me. First of all, the spiritual effect astonished me. As soon as he went, I began going over all he had taught me, especially in economics and metaphysics: bit by bit I came to the conclusion that his Marxian communism was only half the truth and probably the least important half: his Hegelianism, too, which I have hardly mentioned, was pure moonshine in my opinion: extremely beautiful at moments, as the moon is when silvering purple clouds: “history is the development of the Spirit in time: Nature is the projection of the idea in space”, sounds wonderful; but it’s moon-shiney, and not very enlightening. In the first three months of Smith’s absence, my own individuality sprang upright, like a sapling that has long been bent almost to breaking, so to speak, by a superincumbent weight and I began to grow with a sort of renewed youth. Now for the first time, when about nineteen years of age, I came to self-consciousness as Frank Harris and began to deal with life in my own way and under this name, Frank.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  These “arts of existence,” these “techniques of the self,” no doubt lost some of their importance and autonomy when they were assimilated into the exercise of priestly power in early Christianity, and later, into educative, medical, and psychological types of practices. Still, I thought that the long history of these aesthetics of existence and these technologies of the self remained to be done, or resumed. It has been a long time now since Burckhardt pointed out their significance for the epoch of the Renaissance, but their perpetuation, their history, and their development do not end there. * In any case, it seemed to me that the study of the problematization of sexual behavior in antiquity could be regarded as a chapter—one of the first chapters—of that general history of the “techniques of the self.” There is irony in those efforts one makes to alter one’s way of looking at things, to change the boundaries of what one knows and to venture out a ways from there. Did mine actually result in a different way of thinking? Perhaps at most they made it possible to go back through what I was already thinking, to think it differently, and to see what I had done from a new vantage point and in a clearer light. Sure of having traveled far, one finds that one is looking down on oneself from above. The journey rejuvenates things, and ages the relationship with oneself. I seem to have gained a better perspective on the way I worked—gropingly, and by means of different or successive fragments—on this project, whose goal is a history of truth. It was a matter of analyzing, not behaviors or ideas, nor societies and their “ideologies,” but the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought—and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed. The archaeological dimension of the analysis made it possible to examine the forms themselves; its genealogical dimension enabled me to analyze their formation out of the practices and the modifications undergone by the latter. There was the problematization of madness and illness arising out of social and medical practices, and defining a certain pattern of “normalization”; a problematization of life, language, and labor in discursive practices that conformed to certain “epistemic” rules; and a problematization of crime and criminal behavior emerging from certain punitive practices conforming to a “disciplinary” model.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Uncle Ray gave me a tiny gold cross on a chain. Even though he thought I was nuts to be baptized. “You can’t really believe in this crap,” he whispered in my ear as he helped me put the necklace on. I held up my hair so he could fasten it. “I’ve got to believe in something,” I said, low. His hand rested on my neck, warm, heavy. His good plain face, sad hazel eyes. And I realized he wanted to kiss me. I felt it inside me. And when he saw that I felt it, he reddened and looked away.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Ours was a nest of concentric circles, and an enterprise was measured by its value to each circle, from the individual and family to the community and environment. I realized that Rebecca and her colleagues were trying to do nothing less than transform the System of National Accounts, the statistical framework here and in most countries for measuring economic activity. For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment. This group was inventing a new way of measuring profit and loss. By the end of our days together, I understood economics in a whole new way. A balance sheet really could be about balance. —FAITH SMITH, AN OJIBWA educator from Chicago, followed Rebecca onto the board. Quiet, intense, and classically beautiful, Faith represented the half of Native people who live in cities and have a multitribe experience. To give urban Native students a college that included their own history, she helped to found the Native American Educational Services College, a small, private, Indian-controlled, degree-granting institution where students ranged in age from seventeen to seventy. She told me that only 10 percent of Native students who enter mainstream institutions stay long enough to get a degree, partly because they are in an academic version of the world that doesn’t include their experience or even their existence. However, this college was graduating 70 percent of those who entered and sending 20 to 30 percent on to graduate schools. When I went to see Faith at the college in Chicago, we had lunch with students who told me that, in other schools, they felt forced to choose between an education that excluded them and a community that included them. Here, they could have both. Lunch was a lesson in itself. The students explained that food was a generational marker. Their grandparents and others born before World War II had lived in the country and eaten traditional Native foods, the kind that had caused colonists to write home about how much taller, stronger, and healthier Indians were. Then came generations of people living on reservations, dependent on government rations of refined sugar, lard, and white flour, and also with trading posts that dealt in alcohol. Health declined, and alcoholism and diabetes went up. Every student now eating healthy food in that sunny multipurpose classroom had at least one friend or family member who was on dialysis. Taking relatives to hospitals and clinics had become a family ritual. I could see Faith was an example in many ways. For instance, she was president of this college, yet she paid herself the same as the teachers and the janitor whenever cash flow became an issue. Her physical self was important, too. Overworked but healthy and slender, she was a living, breathing example of the possible.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  It was at about this time that I met Antonio Damasio at a small think tank that Dan Schacter, the chair of the psychology department at Harvard, had organized. In a series of brilliant scientific articles and books Damasio clarified the relationship among body states, emotions, and survival. A neurologist who has treated hundreds of people with various forms of brain damage, he became fascinated with consciousness and with identifying the areas of the brain necessary for knowing what you feel. He has devoted his career to mapping out what is responsible for our experience of “self.” The Feeling of What Happens is, for me, his most important book, and reading it was a revelation.[5] Damasio starts by pointing out the deep divide between our sense of self and the sensory life of our bodies. As he poetically explains, “Sometimes we use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them.…One of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean the ins of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.”[6] He goes on to describe how this “screen” can work in our favor by enabling us to attend to pressing problems in the outside world. Yet it has a cost: “It tends to prevent us from sensing the possible origin and nature of what we call self.”[7] Building on the century-old work of William James, Damasio argues that the core of our self-awareness rests on the physical sensations that convey the inner states of the body: [P]rimordial feelings provide a direct experience of one’s own living body, wordless, unadorned, and connected to nothing but sheer existence. These primordial feelings reflect the current state of the body along varied dimensions,…along the scale that ranges from pleasure to pain, and they originate at the level of the brain stem rather than the cerebral cortex. All feelings of emotion are complex musical variations on primordial feelings.[8]

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  “I wanna wait. It’s gotta stay important for a long time. Indian kids waited a long time. If it’s just a fucking Jesus trip, I don’t wanna insult the memory of the American Indian by being part of it.” I thought Kuch’s idea was a good one then, cheap drunk that I am. But I think it’s a good idea now, too. And he’s really doing it. He never talks about it, but he’s gotten very reserved and a little mystical, so I assume he’s going strong. He’s very low in his weight class, so I imagine he’s fasting most of the time. That’s one reason I cleaned up on him so bad. I don’t know exactly how Kuch plans to work his vision quest. Indian kids would get the advice of some older guy about what to do. The older guy, who had been on his vision quest already, would tell the kid to go to a hill outside the camp, or if there were no hill, to someplace far away. There the kid would fast and talk to the Everywhere Spirit until he saw a vision or until the Everywhere Spirit talked back. Then he’d return to camp and discuss what he’d felt and seen. I don’t think the word “vision” meant strictly that you saw something. Although you might talk with a coyote or ride over the earth on a white buffalo, you might not “see” anything. I take the word more in a philosophical way. Like the way you see yourself in the world. That’s the idea of it all: to discover who you are and who your people are and how you fit into the circle of birth and growth and death and rebirth. I can see how you could get pretty far inside yourself sitting naked and hungry and alone on some mountain for a couple days and nights. Storm, in that book Seven Arrows , says an Indian kid would come back from his vision quest and explain what he saw to his adviser; then the adviser would interpret the visions and tell the kid how they revealed his true character and the way the course of his life should run. One of the reasons Kuch might be waiting is to give himself time to acquire the wisdom to interpret for himself. That’s probably an okay idea. Indian men would go on a vision quest when their medicine was going sour and they needed to change their lives. After they had gotten wisdom from their first vision quest they could interpret later ones for themselves. Kuch is pretty smart about using wrestling season like a sweat lodge. You’re eating pretty well—which is to say damn little and every bit of it real food—and you’re in pretty fair shape. The wrestling room is always like a sauna bath and if you get in a good practice you can feel really cleaned out. Sometimes you can even see visions if you get beat around enough.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  It was my responsibility to teach my five children a different direction. This was an enormous task, and I needed more than anything to be successful. My first aspiration toward success was through education. This was a challenging goal, considering I had not been in an official classroom since fifth grade. My home schooling consisted of topics and textbooks my parents agreed were fit material. These textbooks were our scriptures, along with educational books that had been screened carefully to exclude demonstrations of other races, most notably African Americans. People ask me, "What made you leave when so many stay?" I just remember being an observer at a particularly young age. So many things did not feel right to my soul. At a young age, I learned not to question, just obey. Yet it never stopped me from questioning inside my mind. Even as a kindergartner I knew the difference between tolerance and racial bigotry, though no one talked to me about it. It just felt wrong to tell my black classmate that my parents said I couldn't play with her. After leaving, I learned and I continually remind myself how important it is to listen to my instincts and trust them. They usually keep me on the right track. In polygamy, women have to deny these instincts daily to survive in a painfully' exploitative environment of male privilege, obligatory childbirth, and poverty. I graduated from the University of Utah with two bachelor degrees, one in sociology and one in human development. This was a feat. Some might even call it a test of true commitment and endurance, particularly because I accomplished this with five children under the age of seven. My studies helped me understand my family of origin and what constitutes a healthier family. This helped me immensely in raising my children. During my college years, I also devoted much time to counseling. This helped me deal with the trauma of my childhood. I spent endless hours in Gestalt therapy rescuing a small child from sexual abuse and abandonment, and I joined a support group for adults molested as children. In that setting I did not feel so alone in my experiences. I took time to nurture my "inner child" and did things that previously had seemed too frivolous-such as coloring with my children, flying a kite, making clay sculptures, exercising at the spa, or reading a novel. I learned that self-indulgence has personal benefits and isn't evil or selfish. This realization helped heal some of the painful gaps in my experiences. It helped me become a better mother and a balanced person. I began reclaiming my childhood in adulthood, while mothering my own five children and going to college. It became important to me to make a difference for children living in polygamist cults because state officials do not offer them equal protection. I protested at Utah's capital with four other women who had escaped polygamy. This captured media attention from around the globe.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  “I began to make decisions about whether I wanted to do things in my life and in the movements I am part of by checking for my orgasmic yes. And to feel for resistance inside, the small place in my gut that knows before I do that something is not a fit for me and will not increase my aliveness.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Among the three hundred African American delegates were legislators skilled in parliamentary procedure and women who’d never been to a conference before, Deltas in silk dresses and students in army boots, radicals with no faith in voting and civil rights veterans like Dorothy Height, who had worked for voting rights since she was a young woman meeting Eleanor Roosevelt. While the African American women raised umbrella issues of racism and poverty, the Asian and Pacific American Caucus added language barriers, sweatshops, and the isolation of women who came to this country as servicemen’s wives. The Hispanic Caucus spoke about Chicanas being deported away from their American-born children, Puerto Ricans who were treated as if they were not American citizens, and Cubans cut off from families by tensions with their home country. Somehow, this all had to go into one substitute Minority Plank that could come to the floor and be voted on by all delegates. Still, nothing prepared me for the American Indian and Alaskan Native Caucus. These delegates from Indian Country had the most educating to do. For instance, when Native women spoke passionately against “termination,” meaning of treaties, others in the Minority Caucus thought they meant “termination,” as in pregnancies. While other women of color fought for equality inside the mainstream, Native women fought for that plus tribal sovereignty and self-determination outside the mainstream. By treaty, Native nations were supposed to have government-to-government status with Washington, yet in reality they weren’t even allowed to teach their own languages in schools. As one Native delegate said, “Other Americans have histories and families and gene pools in their home countries. If French or Arabic is forgotten in America, it’s still being spoken somewhere. We have no other country. If our languages are wiped out, they can’t come back. If we disappear here, that’s it.” From listening, I began to realize there were major cultures in my own country of which I knew nothing, and these cultures were struggling to keep or restore a balance—between males and females, humans and nature—that modern social justice movements thought they had invented. Even the familiar term Indian Country meant not just self-governing territories within the United States, but also a sense of community that exists within big cities and small towns—wherever First Peoples live. As a Cherokee activist said to me, “Indian Country has become a shorthand for our home, reservation or city. It is where we are known, where we are safe.” I also noticed that humor was even more of a survival tactic here than in most women’s groups. As one asked: What did Columbus call primitive? Answer: Equal women. It was my first glimpse of how little I knew—and how much I wanted to learn. —FINALLY, URGENT ISSUES WERE reduced to phrases short enough for a plank to substitute for the original Minority Plank.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  I pondered over brahmacharya and its implications, and my convictions took deep root. I discussed it with my co-workers. I had not realized then how indispensable it was for self- realization. But I clearly saw that one aspiring to serve humanity with his whole soul could not do without it. It was borne in upon me that I should have more and more occasions for service of the kind I was rendering, and that I should find myself unequal to my task if I were engaged in the pleasures of family life and in the propagation and rearing of children. In a word, I could not live both after the flesh and the spirit. On the present occasion, for instance, I should not have been able to throw myself into the fray, had my wife been expecting a baby. Without the observance of brahmacharya service of the family would be inconsistent with service of the community. With brahmacharya they would be perfectly consistent. So thinking, I became somewhat impatient to take a final vow. The prospect of the vow brought a certain kind of exultation. Imagination also found free play and opened out limitless vistas of service. Whilst I was thus in the midst of strenuous physical and mental work, a report came to the effect that the work of suppressing the ‘rebellion’ was nearly over, and that we should soon be discharged. A day or two after this our discharge came and in a few days we got back to our homes. After a short while I got a letter from the Governor specially thanking the Ambulance Corps for its services. On my arrival at Phoenix I eagerly broached the subject of Brahmacharya with Chhaganlal, Maganlal, West and others. They liked the idea and accepted the necessity of taking the vow, but they also represented the difficulties of the task. Some of them set themselves bravely to observe it, and some, I know, succeeded also. I too took the plunge the vow to observe brahmacharya for life. I must confess that I had not then fully realized the magnitude and immensity of the task I undertook. The difficulties are even today staring me in the face. The importance of the vow is being more and more borne in upon me. Life without brahmacharya appears to me to be insipid and animal-like. The brute by nature knows no self-restraint. Man is man because he is capable of, and only in so far as he exercises, self- restraint. What formerly appeared to me to be extravagant praise of brahmacharya in our religious books seems now, with increasing clearness every day, to be absolutely proper and founded on experience.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  “Most art historians,” Cook said, “have been men, and most artists in historic times have been men, and so the representation of women has had a sexual element. I think one has to come nearer to our own era to make a comparison to this distant period. One needs to look at the work of women artists and how they think about their own bodies and other women’s bodies and how they represent them. And that’s not always sexual. There is an element of these figures that might suggest that they are by women for women.” She points out that in the shape of the breasts and the curves of the hips, the figures seem to present the view a person would see looking down at herself rather than looking at another person.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  The bad news is that self-appointed gurus like Limori become skilled at knowing exactly what temperature each and every person in the group needs to be cooking at to provide her with the greatest element of power, control and manipulation. Looking back, I can see now that our guru knew exactly when to turn up or lower the heat that was directed at every one of us.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  105THE BIRTH OF SATYAGRAHAEvents were so shaping themselves in Johannesburg as to make this self-purfication on my part a preliminary as it were to Satyagraha. I can now see that all the principal events of my life, culminating in the vow of brahmacharya, were secretly preparing me for it. The principle called Satyagraha came into being before that name was invented. Indeed when it was born, I myself could not say what it was. In Gujarati also we used the English pharse ‘passive resistance’ to describe it. When in a meeting of Europeans I found that the term ‘passive resistance’ was too narrowly construed, that it was supposed to be a weapon of the weak, that it could be characterized by hatred, and that it could finally manifest itself as violence, I had to damur to all these statements and explain the real nature of the Indian movement. It was clear that a new word must be coined by the Indians to designate their struggle. But I could not for the life of me find out a new name, and therefore offered a nominal prize through Indian Opinion to the reader who made the best suggestion on the subject. As a result Maganlal Gandhi coined the word ‘Sadagraha’ (Sat=truth, Agraha=firmness) and won the prize. But in order to make it clearer I changed the word to ‘Satyagraha’ which has since become current in Gujarati as a designation for the struggle. The history of this strugle is for all practical purposes a histroy of the remainder of my life in South Africa and especially of my expriments with truth in that sub- continent. I wrote the major portion of this history in Yeravda jail and finished it after I was released. It was published in Navajivan and subsequently issued in book form. Sjt. Valji Govindji Desai has been translating it into English for Current Thought, but I am now arranging to have the English translation[1] published in book form at an early date, so that those who will may be able to familiarize themselves with my most important experiments in South Africa. I would recommend a perusal of my history of Satyagraha in South Africa to such readers as have not seen it already. I will not repeat what I have put down there, but in the next few chapters will deal only with a few personal incidents of my life in South Africa which have not been covered by that history. And when I have done with these, I will at once proceed to give the reader some idea of my experiments in India. Therefore, anyone who wishes to consider these experiments in their strict chronological order will now do well to keep the history of Satyagraha in South Africa bfore him.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Emmys. Haley had done something few imagined possible: he had traced his African American family’s history back to a village in Gambia. The author’s success was based wholly on his claims to have discovered his paternal ancestor, Kunta Kinte, who acquired the name Toby in America. Haley insisted that he had spent long years doing careful research that had enabled him to prove that his family’s oral history (and that told by an African storyteller) could be corroborated with archival documentation. The dialogue in his book may have been made up, but the family saga was a true slice of history. Impressed by this gargantuan effort, the New York Times praised Haley for his “wealth of authentic detail,” and for having instilled his narrative with the “feel of history.” The most prominent review in the newspaper of record averred, “Its truths have been quarried by a mountain of facts.” Newsweek likewise lauded the work as an “extraordinary social document, grounded in exhaustive research and animated by a grand passion for personal and historical truth.” But it was all a lie. 4 Far from uncovering his real roots, it was discovered that the mega-selling author had invented his lineage. Controversy over his historical claims hit the news in 1977, as prominent journalists and scholars called his work a “fraud,” and the full story unfolded over the next five years. He had manipulated his family oral accounts and embellished his family tree in order to tell a grand tale of an exceptional heritage that never existed. For starters, the Gambian storyteller he relied upon merely told Haley what he wanted to hear. The historical Toby was not even born with the name Kunta Kinte—that genealogical lineage was pure fiction. While Haley’s Africa was not a caricature on the order of Tarzan’s overripe jungle, it was a half-conscious or self- conscious distortion: he converted Gambia into a place mirroring middle America, as a land of many villages. The actual village of his reputed ancestors, as Haley admitted, was a British trading post, not the symbolic West African “Eden” it was portrayed as, a pristine world to constitute for history-hungry African-Americans a reverse Plymouth Rock. 5 If that were the extent of the author’s crimes, it would be bad enough. But Haley’s attempts at research actually exposed far more serious errors. The birthdates of Kunta Kinte’s American progeny were wrongly given, and Haley attributed to his family tree the names of people to whom he was unrelated. Neither the white nor the black families archived in Roots matched existing historical records.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  To add to all this, the circumstances surrounding sex work discourse in the United States, and certainly in New York, where I work and live and write, have changed in the last few years. In April 2021, the Manhattan district attorney’s office announced it would no longer prosecute prostitution, with district attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. elaborating, “Criminally prosecuting prostitution does not make us safer, and too often, achieves the opposite result by further marginalizing vulnerable New Yorkers.” The office would continue to prosecute people patronizing sex workers, expressing tacit support for the Nordic model, wherein sex workers are decriminalized but clients are not. This is an insufficient model; criminalized clients fear arrest and exposure and are therefore less likely to comply with screening methods sex workers use to stay safe, hesitant to share their information lest it reach the wrong hands in a sting or raid. The “Sex Trade Survivors Justice and Equality Act,” a bill introduced in the New York state legislature in 2021, supports this partial decriminalization model, while another bill, the “Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act,” first introduced to the legislature in 2019, proposes full decriminalization. The two bills and their supporters remain engaged in a divisive ideological battle. Nonetheless, full decriminalization has at least entered mainstream debate, and myriad books, articles, television shows, and movies that portray sex workers—particularly those who are white and high-earning—as complex, multifaceted individuals have entered the public lexicon. The white, high-end sex worker can speak freely on whatever she likes, precisely because she isn’t, at first glance, assumed to be a hooker, or assumed to only be a hooker, or to be a disempowered hooker. At this point in the cultural conversation, contrary to those who have written previously on the topic—and in no small part because of their contributions and their refusals to mine their own experiences—I think it would be ridiculous to imply that I feel an exploitative demand to write from a personal standpoint or to mine any suffering that I may or may not have experienced. So why, then, confess, if it’s precisely what others have worked so hard to avoid?

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  "'It's been a long time since I had a day that just cuts your life in two. Like, this hangnail on my thumb, I had it yesterday. It's the same hangnail, and I'm a completely different person.' … 'This disease has magnified all our mistakes. Some stupid thing you did when you were nineteen, the one time you weren't careful. And it turns out that was the most important day of your life.'"

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  I rolled back the images. Looked again. There it was. A new tumor, large, filling my right middle lobe. It looked, oddly, like a full moon having almost cleared the horizon. Going back to the old images, I could make out the faintest trace of it, a ghostly harbinger now brought fully into the world. I was neither angry nor scared. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance from the sun to the earth. I drove home and told Lucy.