‘Mother and daughter laugh together, at the fact they can now connect.’

‘Cleaning delivered very little in terms of salary or cachet, but she could sleep well every night knowing that she had done something honest and good.’

‘Once, long ago, it had been her shyness that trapped her.’

‘The room was silent save for the rustling sound of clothes while Ting slowly undressed.’

‘I want to reach under and wrestle the agony out of my being or crawl out of my own wretched skin but sane people don’t dig and claw at their own flesh.’

‘Her hand is trembling when I take hold of it. Everything begins to make sense now.’

‘They come to me when my pain is at its worst: a yawning bear, black throated.’

‘Heterosexual women don't feel what I feel when I look at your pictures.’

‘She didn’t have that tenderness for me that the boys got in abundance.’

‘Apparently no one wanted to invest in who the Stanford computer science department had anointed as the frontrunner for producing machine consciousness.’

‘The woman opposite me in this small attic room is observing me. In particular, she is observing me in relation to my neurotype.’

‘The ancestral blood of my matriarchs runs high with sodium.’

‘Intergenerational trauma is, in my experience, often analysed with an automatic alignment of gender: fathers to sons and mothers to daughters.’

‘I’m afraid that either someone in my head or someone in my life will judge me for my expression of need.’

‘Dreams of being chased can sometimes indicate social anxiety, or hint at the fact that there's something you've been avoiding.’

‘I am a mosaic composed of contradictions: I still love the people I will never forgive.’

‘It’s no coincidence that when I accepted the anger I felt about the abuse I faced, I became proactive in my pursuit of being a writer.’

‘The scab of my real self lies under these bandages of poetry, vodka, and sex, and I’m not ready to open it.’

‘This is your chance to work through your blocks and limiting beliefs and superspeed the process of implementing empowering mantras and new, healthy routines.’

‘How when you were eleven you would hide at the bottom of the linen closet in the guest bathroom that no one ever used.’

‘Can a bunch of cis men make a responsible and meaningful movie about a woman’s struggle to liberate herself from the patriarchy?’

‘Naively, I did not expect shaving my head to be a big deal.’

‘You still experience that feeling of self-consciousness that pricks you every time you slip into leggings and tank tops.’

‘Forget about aliens and spaceships for a moment; the truth of the capability of human beings to commit monstrous acts is here, right now.’

‘My gay imposter syndrome and writing imposter syndrome are always competing to take up more headspace.’

‘Sometimes, I would like to just post the fucking photo. Without overthinking it.’

‘I fear being labeled a problem patient.’

‘The myth that girls mature quicker gets passed down, travelling through the veins of father to son, uncle to nephew.’

‘Sometimes I ask myself if I put on women’s clothes to hide the macho underneath. Am I a wolf in sheep’s clothing or just a man in a dress?’

“I just knew there had to be others like me out there.” An interview with Zoë Noble, founder of ‘We Are Childfree’