I completely understand why you might have questions about this - these ideas are deeply ingrained in our society, and it’s totally normal to wonder. […] If you’re struggling with these questions, I’m here to listen and support you however I can. You are valid, valued, and cared for.

It isn't right to say, "When I was little, I used to love x," if you still love x now [...] the "when I was little" nostalgia was misleading: it turned something that I was taking seriously as an adult into something soupier, less precise, more falsely exotic, than it really was. Why should we need lots of nostalgia to license any pleasure taken in the discoveries that we carry over from childhood, when it is now so clearly an adult pleasure? I decided that from now on I wouldn't get that faraway look when describing things that excited me now, regardless of whether they had first been childhood enthusiasms or not.

And I can't stand the way people say, "When I was a child, I loved elephants," "When I was a child, I loved balloons." Are they trying to say that if they stopped and looked at a balloon today or at an elephant today, they would not love them? Why wouldn't they love them? I think we still love what we have always loved. How could we not? And one of the things that I always loved—I wonder if you did—was the wonderful way that valuable small objects—the Christmas presents and birthday presents that adults always gave to each other—were wrapped, were packed. [...] by the time it had been pulled out of all that paper, out of that milk-white box, out of that cardboard carton, it seemed like the most shining, sparkling thing in the world. And how delicate it seemed—how breakable and precious. And you were right, it was. And my friends and I were the delicate, precious, breakable children, and we always knew it. We knew it because of the way we were wrapped—because of the soft underwear laid out on our beds, soft socks to protect our feet.

"Manifestly," I repeated, as if scolding myself, "no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!" Chance found me that day having worked for a living all morning, broken a shoelace, chatted with Tina, urinated successfully in a corporate setting, washed my face, eaten half of a bag of popcorn, bought a new set of shoelaces, eaten a hot dog and a cookie with some milk; and chance found me now sitting in the sun on a green bench, with a paperback on my lap. What, philosophically, was I supposed to do with that? I looked down at the book. A gold bust of the emperor was on the cover. Who bought this kind of book? I wondered. People like me, sporadic self-improvers, on lunch hours? Or only students? Or cabbies, wanting something to surprise their fares with, a book to wave in front of the Plexiglas? [...] People seemed so alike when you imagined their daily schedules, or watched them walk toward the revolving door (as Dave, Sue, and Steve, not noticing me, were doing now), yet if you imagined a detailed thought-frequency chart compiled for each of them, and you tried comparing one chart with another, you would feel suddenly as if you were comparing beings as different from each other as an extension cord and a grape-leaf roll.

Because I know quite a bit about what's inside me. I've been a student of my feelings since I was nine years old! My feelings! My thoughts! The incredible history of my feelings and my thoughts could fill up a dozen leather-bound books. But the story of my life—my behaviour, my actions—that's a slim volume, and I've never read it. Well, I've never wanted to. I've always thought it would be terribly boring. [...] The most tedious questions, answered in full, as if a person's life were a customs form. Chapter One: What country I grew up in, what city, what street? My parents' race. The money they made. What I was fed. What I was taught. Chapter Two: This is unbelievable—printed in the book: "Washes hair every day unless 'in a hurry'" quote unquote; "when meeting friends for dinner or going to the theater, takes a bath in the late afternoon, puts on fresh clothes." What in the world is going on? This has absolutely nothing to do with what I am like, with anything at all that's important about me! Don't they know that everything in this book is just as true of—of—of my neighbor Jean as it is of me, my neighbor Jean who makes jokes about starving children in Asia, my neighbor Jean who boasts about fucking colleagues at the office on the boardroom table? Don't they know that?

It should not be surprising that those less advantaged might sometimes experience the ecstasy of the mirror: they are moved by the mere fact of being a thing of flesh, which is there; like man, all they need is the pure generosity of young feminine flesh; and since they grasp themselves as a singular subject, with a little bad faith they will also endow their generic qualities with an individual charm; they will discover some gracious, rare, or amusing feature in their face or body; they will think they are beautiful just because they feel they are women.