In the daytime, I was expected to be the straight-A student. I was expected to be college bound. I was expected to be a great big sister. And then at night, I was just a club kid.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the contrasting expectations placed on an individual during the day versus their nighttime identity.
Jacqueline Woodson expresses the challenges of balancing societal expectations with personal identity in her quote. By day, she is held to high standards as a student and a family member, but by night, she embraces a different, more liberated self as a 'club kid.' This duality reflects the complexities of navigating different roles and the struggle between fulfilling external expectations and embracing one's true self.
In practice
Sharing this quote during a discussion on the pressure of societal expectations in schools.
'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.
In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.
Sometimes you do have to laugh to keep from crying. And sometimes the world feels all right and good and kind of like it's becoming nice again around you. And you realize it, and realize how happy you are in it, and you just gotta laugh.
I don't want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.
The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'
I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.
Well, I think that part of being young is not exactly knowing why you do some of the things that you do. And it's by exploring your life or experimenting or making mistakes and learning from them hopefully that you start to forge an identity.
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.
I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.
I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
The first thing to do in life is to do with purpose what one purposes to do.
With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.
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