I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.

All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.

Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.

Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life.

Through [my friends] I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it...which was not really all that different from the love that is necessary in the making of art. It required the effort of always seeing them for themselves and not as I wished them to be.

I treated despair in terms of hierarchy: if there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was negated. I thought I simply had to accept the fact that I was ugly, and that to feel despair about it was simply wrong.

I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.