Martha Beck

So you let the soft animal of your body love what it loves, and then you express it and write it down.

Write it all down, the most forbidden things, because the forbidden things you're thinking are

are the things that consensus has shoved on you and told you never to think.

And the natural response is to fight that or to go completely inert and say, well, then I'll just die.

That was my response.

I think I'll just die.

And yeah, I did.

And then I was still alive.

And I was like, well, now I don't really give a shit what anybody thinks of me because I'm dead.

So I think I'm gay.

Even more than warm versus warm.

The Buddha used to say, wherever you find the ocean, you can know it's the ocean because it always tastes of salt, no matter what it looks like.

Wherever you find enlightenment, you can know what it looks like.

It'll take all kinds of forms that look weird to you, but you will know it's enlightenment because enlightenment always tastes of freedom.

Always.

So it may hurt, it may make your family hate you, it may terrify the crap out of you, but it will feel like freedom.

And when you loved each other out loud, all the rest of us gay people went,

They're setting us all free.

You're setting us all freer and freer and freer.

And you didn't mean to do that.