“I do not and cannot know your exact lived experience, or how you feel in this moment. But I do know what it feels like to be othered, to be subjected to the opinions and judgments of those who don’t understand your truth. To know that your rights often rest in the hands of those who may not see or value your full, authentic self. I know what it feels like to live with the awareness that, no matter how hard you've fought for the rights you have, there are those who might try to have them erased or disregarded, or reversed. I know that it’s frightening and painful and that it can change you to stand in that uncertain space. I see you. I honor every part of your beautiful reality and the expression of your true self, in this body you were born into and the one you have claimed through courage and perseverance, battle after battle. Your life, lived on your terms, in alignment with the pulse of truth within you, is a testament to your strength. You blaze a trail for all of us. No one can diminish your fire, your impact, or the truth of your existence.” CouragePerseveranceSelf AcceptanceAffirmationAuthentic SelfLiving Your TruthEmpowerment Through StruggleQueer VisibilityStrength In IdentityTrans Empowerment Author:Jeanette LeBlanc
“Become a kinder mirror for yourself Practice liking what you see.” Self AcceptanceLoving YourselfSelf CompassionSelf CriticismBuilding Self EsteemSelf KindnessLiking YourselfKind Mirror MetaphorPositive Self ReflectionPracticing Self Love Author:Jeanette LeBlanc
“Being queer was like holding the golden ticket to a club nobody wanted to go to. I had no idea that once I blasted down those closet doors, with their bouncers of fear, religion, and internal bias, the club would be lit. The way a party can be when everyone inside finally knows what it means to come home. My queerness is a Tupperware container (thank god) that nobody will ever find a lid for. A box that cannot be closed. The reclamation of wholeness over goodness, transforming the perpetual misfit into one holy hell of a celebration. Owning my queerness was like learning the desert floor was once the bottom of the ocean, meaning the towering 200-year-old saguaro watching over me was somehow born underwater. It is the dogged insistence on coloring outside of every single line. It is the refusal to accept a singular definition that makes the word witch at me finally feel at home in the spaces where words are left behind. My queerness rests its foundation on a ground named freedom. I speak it loudly because I have the freedom to do so without fear of reprisal or harm. I claim this life of mine under the rainbow and the complexity of the history it has given me fiercely. To love a woman in a world that said I must not will never be anything but a revolution. And when I kiss her, trust me, entire galaxies are mine.” Self AcceptanceComing OutSapphic LoveLiving AuthenticallyRevolutionary LoveDefying ExpectationsBreaking Free From FearQueer CelebrationQueer FreedomReclaiming Wholeness Author:Jeanette LeBlanc
“Sometimes I wish I didn’t find my home in the depths. That I didn’t crave connection below the pretty surface of things. I've wished to be like all of “them”—the ones who live neat and tidy lives, not always asking questions or seeking more. Able to ignore the dull ache that speaks to places inside me that long to be seen. Performing a predecided role for external approval. Practiced at tucking away parts that don’t fit the prescribed notions for how one should be or act or feel or want or love or fuck or live. But that will never be me.” AuthenticitySelf AcceptanceNon ConformityPersonal IdentityDeep ConnectionsInner LongingLiving TruthfullyFeeling Out Of PlaceRejection Of Societal NormsSeeking Deeper Meaning Author:Jeanette LeBlanc
“Self-love is an act of holy disruption. To love yourself in a world that profits directly from your self-loathing is the ultimate subversion of all that seeks to keep you tame. We've been taught to hate all that we are (our softness, our fierceness, our not-enoughness, our too-muchness, our tender flesh, our hard bones, our voices, our insatiable hunger, our yearning for more, our aging, our youth, our ugly, our beauty, our all) so that we can be packaged into a commodity that sells us back to ourselves. Our self-hatred is, in many ways, one of the pillars that capitalism and the patriarchy rely on to keep us small and contained, caged and corralled, safe and quietly in place. To fall headfirst into a lifelong love affair with our purpose, our passion, our capacity, for pleasure, with the sound of our yes and the tenor of our no. With the reflection in the mirror. With the rich inner landscape of our fumbling and messy aliveness - this threatens the status quo. As Naomi Wolf said, "Our appetites DO need to be controlled if things are to stay in place." I don't know about you, but I'm at all not interested or invested in keeping things in place, in maintaining the status quo, in propping up a paradigm that's been trembling on its last legs for far too long. I don't want to have to tamp down my desire, to contain the embers of my fire, to minimize the heat of my burn. I want to love myself enough to always ask for more, and then I want to love myself harder so that I can expand wide enough to receive it when it comes. And no, I don’t think this is easy. Or simple. Or even always gentle. But you loving you? Like really, really loving you? It subverts the whole damn thing. It disrupts the narrative. It flips the script. It’s a way to reclaim all that has been taken. To demand your seat at the table. To call your wholeness home.” Self EsteemSelf LoveSelf AcceptanceSelf EmpowermentSelf Love QuotesSelf Empowerment QuotesSelf Love Is The Best LoveSelf Love QuoteSelf Love Self CareSelf Love Practice Author:Jeanette LeBlanc
“Do you ever feel like you are giving far fewer fucks and yet still caring so much it sometimes feels like there is only the most tissue-thin layer separating your soul from this world? Like your heart may be broken but your spirit is still rising? Are you refusing to conform and somehow still fitting just right? Able to look people right in the eye without apology and also like you’re a teenager again, bashful and blushing and off-kilter, like that moment when lips unexpectedly pressed against your head and face buried in your hair fingers trailed down y our arm, the way your stomach can flip-flop like that, even now. Do you ever walk on purpose even when you have nowhere to go? Do you notice things deeply, like dark red lipstick prints on pristine white coffee mugs? Like the way whiskey burns and cool white sheets feel against your skin at the end of the day? Are you claiming your identity, clear and strong and true, and also sinking into the vast unknowable mystery of your all? Do your days feel like longing and acquiescence and learning to stop grasping at things that are ready to leave or that choose not to come closer? Are you making a home of your own skin and inviting the world inside? Are you learning that cultivating solid boundaries and driving into a wide open horizon both feel like freedom, like the harsh desert mountains and the soft ocean wisdom and the road to healing that joins the two? Does it all feels like solidity, like truth, like forgiveness and recklessness and heat and sexy and holy, all rolled up together? Do you crave the burn of heat from another and the for nothing to be louder than sound of your own heartbeat, all at once? Do you finally know that you can choose a love and a life that does not break you? That you can claim a softer beauty and a kinder want. That even your animal hunger can soften its rough edges and say a full-throated yes to what is good and kind and holy. Do you remember that insanity is not a prerequisite for passion and that there is another pathway to your art, one that does not demand your pain as payment for its own becoming? Are you learning to show up? To take up space? To feel the power? Is it full of contradiction, does it feel like fire underwater, are you rising to sing?” Self LoveSelf AcceptanceSelf EmpowermentPersonal PowerQuotes For WomenQuestions For Women Author:Jeanette LeBlanc