Rage not against yourself but against the culture that lied to you. Grieve not for your discrepancy from a fictitious “ideal” that is at best arbitrary and at worst an act of oppression and violence; grieve for the compassionate world you were born deserving… and did not get.

Once you know what’s true, can you let go of what’s false? Can you abandon the goals to which you have tied aspects of your identity? It requires a journey through the pit of despair, grieving for the map that was wrong and all the places you missed as a result.

Too many women make their choices based not on what they like, but on what they believe their partner likes or what they’ve been told they “should.”

…if we try to “numb” emotional pain, we get a break from the pain… but the healing is put on pause, too.

…nonjudging allows you to feel what you feel, whether or not it makes sense to you, whether or not it’s comfortable, whether or not it’s what you believe you should be feeling. Nonjudging is neutrally noticing your own internal states…

Knowing how your sexuality works is important. But welcoming your sexuality as it is, without judgment or shame, is more important. And that’s the hard part for a lot of women.

But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will. Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last.

Because you’ve dealt with the stressor,” I said, “but not the stress. Your bodies still think you’re being chased by the lion.”

Reduce your stress, be affectionate toward your body, and let go of the false ideas about how sex is “supposed” to work, to create space in your life for how sex actually works.

Knowing where the clitoris is is important, but knowing where your clitoris is is power.

On the day you’re born, you’re given a little plot of rich and fertile soil, slightly different from everyone else’s. And right away, your family and your culture start to plant things and tend the garden for you, until you’re old enough to take over its care yourself. They plant language and attitudes and knowledge about love and safety and bodies and pleasure. And they teach you how to tend your garden, because as you transition through adolescence into adulthood, you’ll take on full responsibility for its care. And you didn’t choose any of that. You didn’t choose your plot of land, the seeds that were planted, or the way your garden was tended in the early years of your life. As you reach adolescence, you begin to take care of the garden on your own. And you may find that your family and culture have planted some beautiful, healthy things that are thriving in a well-tended garden. And you may notice some things you want to change. Maybe the strategies you were taught for cultivating the garden are inefficient, so you need to find different ways of taking care of it so that it will thrive. Maybe the seeds that were planted were not the kind of thing that will thrive in your particular garden, so you need to find something that’s a better fit for you.

Listen to what they say—listen with your heart, not with your fear.

The notion of “all the same parts, organized in different ways” is as true for the ways a woman’s body changes over the course of her life as it is for the ways people’s genitals vary. And just as everyone’s genitals are normal and beautiful, so all women’s bodies are normal and beautiful.

My view is that the basic fact of homology—all the same parts, organized in different ways—is more important than either.