If you feel like the beginning of your history is rooted in slavery, that really, I think, messes with your sense of self, your self-esteem, and your self-worth.
'Metals' has partly been about me regaining my self respect and I feel like I'm growing the muscles I want to grow again.
I want my words to open a portal through which the reader may leave the self, migrate to some other human sky and return 'disposed' to otherness.
When I do an impression of someone or when I am pretending to be someone else, something freaky happens: I feel the person I am mimicking behind my eyeballs. Their head is sitting perfectly inside mine, helping me project a false self out on to the world. And it's not always a choice.
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical.
To the Muslim woman, the hijab provides a sense of empowerment. It is a personal decision to dress modestly according to the command of a genderless Creator; to assert pride in self, and embrace one's faith openly, with independence and courageous conviction.
In high school, I came out to my friends as queer. My entire world opened up; this was a monumental step toward unveiling my truest self. I had my first girlfriend when I was sixteen years old.
A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.
If you manifest your true self through nature and your normal surroundings, I find that the most eerie. Like when you see birds suddenly start flying in a different direction or when you see moths forming weird shapes, I think that's the weirdest way to let yourself be known.
Beloved, till life can charm no more; And mourned, till Pity's self be dead.
Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.
Tears shed for self are tears of weakness, but tears shed for others are a sign of strength.
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
Having long suspected that there was something alive in there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely individual and independent, we've celebrated by giving it a real name. My self.
My self encompasses a lot of different things.
I was bullied in elementary to middle school. It messed with my self esteem.
I was just starting out, trying to become a screenwriter, and I became the Austin slam champion three times. For a nerdy, kind of a socially awkward guy, that did wonders for my self esteem.
My bravery however was the effect of assurance for could I have believed the current report, I should have fled as fast as any man, no man can possibly have a greater reluctance to an intimacy with Sir William Howe than my Self.
Being teased and losing my self value eventually ended up inspiring me to be a better version of myself.
I like to get in tune with my self and really give myself the time to just be.
