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I was sure everyone stared and gaped whenever my arms were exposed. I hated the way they looked.
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They are covered in red bumps called keratosis pilaris or chicken skin if you are rude. My only other beauty blight was on the backs of my arms. My hair texture was highly desirable as adults would constantly remind me others, mainly them, would love to have it and had to get perms for the same effect. Slowly but surely I started to grow it out but the process felt excruciatingly slow.
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It was cut short in elementary school because my mom didn't want to deal with the tangles and I refused to brush my untamed hair. The blemishes I thought everyone saw and silently laughed or judged me for no one seemed to care enough to mock me over. Mine did and still does to a certain extent without much effort on my part. It's really easy to love your body when it fits neatly into society's beauty standards. I finally figured out, fairly recently, that just because your career path isn't normal or safe doesn't mean you won't enjoy it or the journey along the way. I yearned to escape into something new and interesting completely unlike the dull classes I'd been sitting through for years. As long as it involved reading or writing in some capacity I was all for it. I wanted to get through high school and college to get to the next great thing even though I wasn't really sure what that was.
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I felt the same desperation for escape as her but for different reasons. For hours I would pass the time reading Little House on the Prairie books while my grandmother got her hair done in her small Texas town. During my summer visits it felt like the untamed west even though it was just a few hours north of the benign suburbs. I identified with young Roxane and our similar childhood interests of reading and writing all the time with school being the diversion.
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I feel like it needs time to marinate for the full impact of her powerful prose and story. While deeply engrossing I didn't want to read this too quickly. I wanted to power through this over the past Labor Day weekend but didn't receive it until Tuesday. But through time and distance I see my body as a tapestry or road map that tells my story in a different way than I would but truthfully. I used to needlessly worry about all the perceived blemishes on my body from past transgressions or sheer dumb luck. The wounds and battle scars can be inconspicuous or completely visible. It doesn't get more personal than a story about your body and everything effecting it and your life. Bad Feminist is up next on my reading list. Her newest work, Hunger, is deeply personal. Afterwards I scoured the internet for more interviews and TED talks. I can't pretend I didn't know about her at all but my interest was reinvigorated recently by her interview with Girlboss radio. The immensely talented writer, Roxane Gay, has been dancing on the edge of my peripheral vision for awhile.