Margo Jefferson Quotes

I think there's so much feeling among young girls where they feel like they have to be this perfect thing - and they don't. Perfect people don't exist. Sometimes people need to be told it.

I'm more comfortable with whatever's wrong with me than my father was whenever he felt he failed or didn't measure up to the standard he set.

When you become a slave to a public persona and don't feel comfortable without it, it becomes a shield, and it shouldn't come at the expense of your self-worth.

Our biggest struggle as human beings is to project ourselves as something that society has deemed admirable or likable instead of being honest.

You just want so badly to be the best version of what people are saying, you want to look like the covers you're on, but it's hard to do that everyday.

Sport that consumed me for over two decades . . . is now gone. Now it's just me. No pressure, no expectations, no need to be fast, good, strong or to even improve. Yet I can't let go of this idea that I always need to be more than I am. And it is eating me alive.

I think the obsession with wanting to change yourself is crazy over the top.

I suffer from an amazing amount of insecurities, and I'm grateful that my body image, it's normally not something I pay attention to.

I don't want to have to be beautiful all the time. I want to be able to look cruddy in my weekend sweats, with a pimple on my face and pimple cream on top of the pimple. The expectation to always be beautiful bothers me.

You're never going to look perfect to yourself even if you might look perfect to somebody else.

Middle school was probably my hardest time. I was trying to fit in for so long, until about junior year of high school when I realized that trying to fit into this one image of perfection was never going to make me happy.

For a really long time in my life, I fought against how I look. Because I was raised Catholic in school, where everyone had to wear a suit and tie. I hated everything that stood for. And I realized when I walked down the street, everyone would see the guy I hated and not the guy I was.

Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.

I know that when I attached my sense of identity a little too closely to my work that I might be distracting myself from feelings of unworthiness. It wasn't the number of hours I worked or how bloodshot my eyes were that defined the difference. It was something internal.

I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.

I'm a very positive person, but this whole concept of having to always be nice, always smiling, always happy, that's not real. It was like I was wearing a mask. I was becoming this perfectly chiselled sculpture, and that was bad. That took a long time to understand.

There used to be a real me, but I had it surgically removed.

But I've always been fascinated with that prettiest-girl-in-the-class person that I never was, getting inside her head and showing that she's just as tormented and messed up as everybody else.

I don't think I am narcissistic. I think I have low self-esteem.

Sometimes I think, 'Why couldn't I have been normal?'

This society is driven by neurotic speed and force accelerated by greed and frustration of not being able to live up to the image of men and woman we have created for ourselves; the image has nothing to do with the reality of people.

I like myself a lot more than I used to. I had a very difficult time in my twenties especially. It was hard for me to look in the mirror and find something that I liked about myself.

I will never be able to fix myself enough to the point I like myself, so I just jumped to the point where I said, 'I like myself as I am.'

It seems to me that everyone on this planet whom I know or have worked with is suffering from self-hatred and guilt to one degree or another. The more self-hatred and guilt we have, the less our lives work. The less self-hatred and guilt we have, the better our lives work, on all levels.

I thought it was something peculiar to me. I thought I was abnormal.