If you're making yourself vulnerable in your writing, then they know where to hurt you, which is extra fun. I had to develop coping mechanisms on the fly, and slowly it got better, to the point where now I barely notice. I'm like an old, gnarly turtle now. The interaction with the troll who impersonated my dad made me start to understand who these people are, and I figured out, in a really profound way, that happy people don't do this. It's hard to feel afraid of someone when you pity them.

When I started tentatively dipping a toe into fat-positive internet spaces, I learned that reclaiming the term was the quickest and most powerful way to make it stop hurting. If you can say, "Yes, I am fat, and it's okay to be fat," then all of a sudden it doesn't hurt when someone says it to you. And it's also just a descriptor. It's like tall.

I feel like women in comedy have staked out space for themselves and circled the wagons in this inspiring way to say that it's absolutely unacceptable and ludicrous to suggest that women aren't funny anymore in 2016. It just makes you look like a dinosaur.

Just live! Live now! Don't wait, and don't let anyone tell you that you're a work in progress.

The messaging campaign that stigmatized the term feminist definitely worked on me when I was a teenager. I always believed in equality, but there's such intense pressure to be cool and not alienate boys, to not be a pain in the ass  -  to not be "that kind of woman."

I didn't stop hating my body because my body changed; I stopped hating my body because my mind changed. I realized that the beauty standards I'd grown up striving and failing to meet were artificial and arbitrary, and I could choose to simply say "no" and define my own value.

I've always been an escapist, I guess, and I spend so much time on the internet absorbing ideas and processing the horrors of the world that when I'm actually going to read for pleasure, it's always something ridiculous about a dragon. I'm so saturated with the injustice and torment of the real world that it's really hard for me to get myself to read anything that's even set in our universe, because I'm exhausted by our universe.