"On the first day of summer school, my mom told me to walk up to the teacher, and say: 'My name is... I'm here to learn. And I'm going to ace this class.'"
"I don't have any big dreams. Back home, my mother worked in a bread factory and my father was unemployed."
“I got in trouble because I hit my classmate during our math exam because he was calling me names like he always does. The teacher said: ‘Why did you hit him?’ And I said: ‘Because he called me frog face.’ And then I had to sit alone for ten minutes"
“I worked at a make-up counter after graduating with a chemistry degree. My mother was so mad. But I love make-up. It’s like therapy. You make people feel good. You can change how they think, how they walk, how they talk. It’s transformative. Even when I got a job at a tech company, I still primarily viewed myself as a make-up artist... So I finally took the leap. I moved to New York...And I think my mother is finally coming around.”
“I’m just working on universal peace and getting everybody to love each other. I’m an official brother man. I’m the one. Well, I’m one of the ones. There are all kinds of brother mans: black, white, Indian. A brother man is somebody who helps when people need help. A brother man will stand up and say: ‘That’s not right.’ A lot of women are brother mans too. But we don’t call them brother mans. We call them sisters.”
“It started getting really bad in ninth grade. Shaking hands became uncomfortable. I couldn’t touch money. I couldn’t eat with utensils if they had touched the table. Door knobs were the worst. Touching them felt like touching dog poop. It got to the point where I couldn’t even play bassoon, and that’s what I love the most. My bed became my only safe space. I’d stay in bed for a week at a time. "
“Two days ago at school we learned how to play a game called chest. You have horses and pawns and bishops and castles, and you’re supposed to steal other peoples’ places by squirting your pawn diagonal and eating their pieces. If anyone else wants to learn chest, I’ll teach them.”
“I want to be an engineer because you get to mess around with technology and help people. But first I need to get better at long division. One thing I’d like to do is make cheaper prosthetics for people in the army. One day I was bored so I googled them and saw that they cost $3500. Maybe I can make them the same way but with recycled materials.”
