IT'S ALL ABOUT THAT HOUSE WIFE LIFE, YALL. BLESSED!Note from creator/collector of quotes: Please excuse any typos from the book quotes. I literally had the books in my lap and typed out the quotes without looking at the screen usually. I think you can make out what they are supposed to say and fix them. I hope someone out there likes this collection of quotes and maybe will go to the book store or library and pick up one of these books. It took me years to collect all these quotes and I still have more but they aren't all related to mental illness or anything really. just random quotes.
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POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE -- Carrie Fisher
-”I hated it, I even wanted to stop, but I just couldn’t. It was like I saw a car, and a maniac had gotten behind the wheel.”
-”I feel so agitated all the time, like a hamster in search of a wheel.”
-”The positive way to look at this is that from here things can only go up. But I’ve been up, and I always felt like a trespasser. A transient at the top. It’s like I’ve got a visa for happiness, but for sadness I’ve got a lifetime pass.”
-”I feel like I’ve got bugs flying around inside of me. … The medication wears off and the feelings just fall on you. And they’re not your basic fun feelings, either. These are the feelings you’ve been specifically avoiding– The one you almost killed yourself to avoid.”
-”I’ve used up all the Not Cry I was issued at birth. Now, it appears, it’s crying time.”
-”The only thing worse than being hurt is everyone knowing you’re hurt.”
-”In the last few years I’ve become an accepted eccentric at best, and a fuckup at worst. I feel like I’ll let people down if I take away the behavior they’ve grown accustomed to disapproving of.”
-”I think that’s what maturity is: a stoic response to endless reality.”
-”I rarely cry. I save my feelings up inside me like I have something more specific for them. I’m waiting for the exact perfect situation and then *Boom!* I’ll explode in a light show of feeling and emotion—a pinanta stuffed with tender nuance and pent-up passions.”
-”Sometimes I don't think I was with reality in mind. And now I can look forward to an eternal, open-ended reality. A reality that dreams me without waking.”
-”...And I acknowledged that, but deep down—and you don’t get too far deep down with me, because I’ve thrust all the deep down right up to the surface…”
-”I don’t allow myself to hope for that much, but I guess underneath my nonhoping is the hoping thing….”
-”Lets escalate the war on this area of my life, and if we can’t make me better, can we at least make me not *care* that I’m not better.”
-”But we have these great talks. It’s like we talk about the real issues as if we’re talking about the weather.”
-”I was born imagining myself with an apron on, with pies cooling on the window sill and babies crying upstairs. I thought that all that stuff would somehow anchor me to the planet, that it was the weight I needed to keep from just flying off into space.”
-”Look,” he said, “I don’t think we should continue this discussion. I don’t like this side of you.”
“I’m not a box,” she said. “I don’t have sides. This is it. One side fits all. This is it.”
-”It’s all about distraction, a way of being transported out of your life, of having someone else’s life for a while. I identifying with them. Feeling relief that their predicament isn’t yours, or feeling relief that it is. A way of dreaming outside your head.”
-”Just ‘case they treat you lille a jerk doesn’t mean you have to act like one. How they treat you is not necessarily who you are. My mother always told me that. She’d say ‘Honey, just ‘case they treat you like shit, you could still act like pie.’ “
-”Most people dream big, you dream small. It’s just whatever you haven’t got is what you want. It isn’t the life, it’s what you do with it. So, do something regular with your irregular life, rather than trying to get a regular one, ‘case you’d just do something irregular with that.”
-”This morning she put on *Somewhere in Time*, which sounded like what she thought love was like. It sounded like longing.”
-”...In any case, he had told her about this music— he said he listened to it a lot— but he hadn’t warned her that it sounded like the feelings you had to be brave about.”
-”She was going to feel good now… She was going to enjoy her life as though she was someone else living it, someone who had won living her life as a prize. Her house, her friends, her family, her clothes, her car… she was going to appreciate them as though she had had this whole other life before, and now she had won this one.”
-”Her lips moved over her teeth like bubbling water, and when she understood particularly well, she batted her eyelashes at him. Her face was a Richter scale registering her comprehension.”
-”When she was twenty-one she had written in her journal, ‘I narrate a life I’m reluctant to live.’ “
-”You seem very open about yourself, but it’s really just part of your need to control. You want people to know that you’re well aware of the truth about yourself. It’s like a fat girl walking into a room and announcing she’s fat.”
-”Describing herself was [her] way of being herself.”
-”You have fashioned yourself a personality of highly intricate design. It would be almost impossible to dismantle…”
-”I want you to lead a life instead of following one around.”
-”She wondered how long she was going to stay in bed. She wondered if she would awake one morning—maybe *tomorrow* morning—and feel like bounding back into her life, refreshed and unafraid. Just now, though, she felt stale and paralyzed.”
-”She wanted to be so tranquil, to be someone who took walks in the late-afternoon sun, listening to the birds and crickets and feeling the whole world breathe. Instead, she lived in her head like a mad woman locked in a tower, hearing the wind howling through her hair and waiting for someone to come and rescue her from feeling things so deeply that her bones burned.”
-”She had plenty of evidence that she has a good life. She just couldn’t feel the life she saw she had. It was as though she had cancer of the perspective.”
-”It startled her to see her reflection, because she didn’t identify with her appearance. …She wasn’t what she looked like, she was what she sounded like. That was why she always got confused in the closet. What should she wear? It was hard to dress a voice.”
-”She found undesirables desirable. She sought out unpleasant boyfriends, then complained about them as though the government had allocated them to her.”
-”Still, at least she felt like she was taking part in something, even if it was a nightmare.”
-”You underestimate the power of food allergies,” said her mother confidently. … “just imagine, [she] said. “Here I’ve spent all these years in therapy, and it could have been tuna all along”
-”I’m going for a world record,” said Suzanne “I’ve been in bed for over a week. My life is like a lone, forgotten Q-Tip in the second-to-last drawer.” …
“Who am I speaking to?” asked Lucy. “Sylvia Plath?”
-”A controlled nervous breakdown?” … “I don’t know,” Suzanne said doubtfully. “I’m not that nervous, and it’s not really a break down. It’s more of a *back*down, or a backing off. A pit stop. That’s what we’re having, a nervous pit stop. A not-so-nervous pit stop.”
-”... I always thought you could work on a relationship, but there’s work and then there’s *construction* work.”
-”It’s like, if we can make it sound smart enough, we’re allowed to do stupid things.”
-”My mood is lifting,” she said, “like a small, heavy plane.”
-”I think there’s probably something about living your whole life in a popularity contest-– trying to get people to like you who you couldn’t give a flying fuck about— that kills relaxation.”
-”Sometimes I feel like I’m auctioning myself off to the lowest bidder.”
-”It’s like you applied for a weird life and got a regular one by accident.”
-”It was like a punishment to fit the reward.”
-”You just don’t know what to do when there’s no trouble. You’re looking for something to fix. Watch out you don’t fix it till it breaks.”
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Prozac Nation – Elizabeth Wurtzel
I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Life all the drugs put together— … —can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before te warranty ran out.
But then the dullness of everyday kicks in, and I get crazy.
… not understanding that I don’t want to feel better in the morning, how that way of life is wearing me out, that what I really want is not to feel this way in the first place.
Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable But you won't’ even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, … and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth live, a horror and a black blot on white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.
Sharing kids with a person you have come to despise must be a bit like getting caught in a messy car wreck and then being forced to spend the rest of your life paying visits to the paraplegic in the other vehicle: You are never allowed to forget your mistake.
My inner resources were so thorough and complete that I often had no idea what to do with other children. They all seemed so juvenile to me…
The trouble was, I thought this alternative persona that I had adopted was just that: a put-on, a way of getting attention, a way of being different. And maybe when I first started walking around talking about plastic and death, maybe then it was an experiment. But after a while, the alternative me really just was me. Those days that I tried to be the little girl I was supposed to be drained me. I went home at night and cried for hours because so many people in my life expecting me to be a certain way was too much pressure, as if I’d been held against a wall and interrogated for hours, asked questions I couldn’t quite answer any longer.
I had, indeed, metamorphosed into this nihilistic, unhappy girl. … I had invented the monster and now it was overtaking me. This was what I’d come to. This was what I’d be for the rest of my life. Things were bad now and would get worse later.
How could I let anybody see me this way? How could I expose other people to my person, to this bane to the world? I was one big mistake.
And I was starting to want to know the worst, I wanted to know how bad it could get.
The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job. If you’re still at the point when you’re even just barely going through the motions—showing up at work, paying the bills— you are still okay or okay enough. A desire not to acknowledge depression in ourselves or those close to us– better known these days as *denial*, is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you are actually flying out of a window you don’t have a problem.
I knew the limits of the people who were close to me, and in my worst downs I was ever more attuned to them. Depression gave me extreme perspicacity; rather than skin, it was as if I had only thin gauze bandages to shield me from everything I saw.
I’m the girl who is lost in space, the girl who disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background.
Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible, getting covered over more thickly with darkness, coats and coats of darkness that are going to suffocate me in the sweltering heat of the summer sun that I can’t even see anymore, even though I can feel it burn.
If I were another person, I wouldn’t want to deal with me. It’s so hopeless. I want out of this life. I really do. I keep thinking that if I could just get a grip on myself, I could be alright again.
I keep thinking that I'm driving myself crazy, but I swear, I swear to god, I have no control. It’s so awful. Its like demons have taken over my mind. And nobody believes me. Everybody thinks I could be better if I wanted to. But I can't… i cant be myself anymore, i mean, actually, I am being myself right now and it’s so horrible.
[He] seemed to resign himself to the idea that he could not truly help me to get better, so the best he could do was just prevent my sinking even lower. Like everything else i my life, our biweekly visits were just a Band-Aid, a small buffer zone full of social prattle and practical advice, but getting down to the bone and the skin and the eyes and the teeth was not in the offing
No matter if I ever got out of this depression alive, it made no difference because it had already fundamentally changed me. There had been permanent damage. My morose character would not ever go away because depression was everything about me. It colored every aspect of me so thoroughly, and I became resigned to that.
I start to get the weird feeling that nothing is really happening to me, that I am watching a movie and I can turn away at any time. I start to think of everything in third person.
I don’t know if I’m running because I’m scared or if I’m scared because I’m running.
Time became palpable and vicious. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.
The doctor asks if I have a substance abuse problem, and all I can do is laugh. I laugh really hard and really loud, …because what I’m thinking is how nice it would be if my problem were drugs, if my problem weren’t my whole damn life and how little relief from it the drugs provide.
I was loading myself with whatever available medication I could find, doing whatever I could to get my head to shut off for a while.
I have always been a coper, I’ve mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I’ve always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown.
Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic–I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.
I could see it all: My life would suddenly be infused with all sorts of symbolism and meaning that it simply did not have as long as I was alive.
I would most likely walk around in a suicidal reverie the rest of my life, never actually doing anything about it. Was there a psychological term for that? Was there a disease that involved an intense desire to die, but no will to go through with it?
…it was impossible for me to work when there were people around to talk to. Between so much writing and so much chatting, my weeks were too packed for me to notice my emotional state at all, except in passing blinks of fatigue.
I was so nervous all the time, always feeling like there was something I should be doing but wasn’t, always feeling at the mercy of something that felt like a hive of bees buzzing in my head.
What I wouldn’t do to be Alice climbing through the looking glass, taking one of those pills that makes you small, so small. What I wouldn’t do to be less.
Take a sad private matter, give the facts in technicolor detail to perfect strangers, and thus relieve myself of my life. And then later, I would feel cheap and empty, deeply dissatisfied, like a verbal slut, the girl who’d give it all away to just any old anybody.
So maybe I wanted to reclaim my life, make it private, make it mine. Maybe, just maybe, if I lost the urge to tell all to all, maybe that would be behavior befitting a happy person and maybe then i could be happy
I daze and doze to the sound of a voice and guitars and mandolins and percussions. I fade into what feels like thousands of strings. …if only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.
That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end.
And still, I can’t quite shake this feeling that we live in a world gone wrong, that there are all these feelings you’re not supposed to have because there’s no reason to anymore. But they’re still there, stuck somewhere, a flaw that evolution hasn’t managed to eliminate yet, like tonsils or an appendix.
The place was as dark at noon as it was at midnight. It was the perfect site for a nervous breakdown.
I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don’t know, read something or write my masterpiece.
I want all my important possessions, my worldly goods, with me at all times. I want to hold what little sense of home I have left with me always. I feel so heavy all the time, so burdened. This must be a little bit like what it’s like to be a bag lady, to drag your feet here, there, and everywhere, nowhere at all
My gifts are unspecific. I am an artist manque, someone full of crazy ideas and grandiloquent needs and even a little bit of happiness, but with no particular way to express it.
It seems that I have spent so much time trying to convince people that I really am depressed, that I really can’t cope—but now that it’s finally true, I don’t want to admit it. I am petrified by what is happening to me, so frightened of what the bottom of the well will look like once I sink down there, so frightened that this is it. How did this happen to me?
I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that al I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal.
Story of my life: I am so self-destructive, I turn solutions into problems. Everything I touch, I ruin. I’m Midas in reverse.
Usually, tears are cathartic. As you cry, the salt and water shed from your eyes and drag misery along the way.
I keep repeating that I want my brain annihilated, that it won’t stop running and churning and burning and trying to make sense of my life, and even here in the infirmary, it still needs a vacation.
I discovered …that affection as medicine is highly overrated, that a person who is as sick with depression as I most certainly was cannot possibly be rescued through the power of anyone’s love. It is so much worse than that. I mean if you were to find a shattered mirror, find all the pieces, all the shards and all the tiny chips, and have whatever skill and patience it took to put all that broken glass back together so that it was complete once again, it would still be a useless glued version of its former self, which could show only fragmented reflections of anyone looking into it.
Some things are beyond repair. And that was me: There was so much damage, it was going to take a lot more than one person, or even one therapist, one drug, one electroshock treatment—it was going to take a lof of everything before the Humpty Dumpty remains of my life would be reassembled
Every so often, I space out and say. I’m sorry, I got distracted, what did you say? And a couple of times I come very close to saying, Can’t you see I’m a mess?! Why don’t you ask me why?
Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn’t stop an suffer with me.
I discovered that the hardest part of each day, as is the case with most depressives, was simply getting out of bed in the morning. If i could do that much I had a fighting chance. To get through the day, that is. I decided to try to do some writing, hoping it might afford me the same sense of release that it once had, so many years before. But as soon as I say down at my typewriter, I froze before the keyboard. I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. No poems, no prose, no words.
Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with a pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify it or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I’m feeling now. It’s so bad, it’s useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.
Her tone combined hysterical fear with mournful horror. Once again, I felt like my depression was a broken car and she was ordering me to *just fucking fix it*, as if my mind could be rewired like a faulty transmission or unresponsive brakes.
I know it’s precisely this neither-here-nor-there approach that has led me into this marginal existence that is at the heart of my depression, but I still can’t stop myself from my behavior.
But I was able to manage it because I had such a desperate, deliberate goal: I *had* to get the hell out of my life for a little while. When I want to escape, when I *need* to escape, it is amazing what I am able to do, it is shocking what hidden reserve of strength I can find to undertake the task.
… it was my body that was quite vulnerable and my mind that was, in fact, untouchable, unreachable by much of anything human. Still, strange and seemingly supernatural forces invaded my psyche at a constant rate. Moods and feelings of a mostly miserable variety swooped down on me like birds of prey at fierce and unpredictable moments. I felt like such a messy, highly reactive creature that I didn’t want people to get near me. I felt radioactive, as carcinogenic as uranium, and it made me deeply suspicious of anyone who’d be fool enough to get in touching distance of this poison girl.
I alone knew the truth about life, knew that it was all a miserable downward spiral that you could either admit to or ignore, but sooner or later we were all going to die.
Rock bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable.
Rock bottom is feeling like the only thing that matters in all of life is the one bad moment.
Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It’s a failure of vision, a failure to see the world as it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not—and not some other way.
Bathing seems like an exercise in futility, like making my bed or brushing my teeth or combing my hair. Clean the slate, then let it get sullied once more. Wipe it down, and wait for more filth. This inevitable pattern of progress and regress, which is really what life is all about, is too absurd for me to continue.
The moment in *The Bell Jar* when Esther Greenwood realized after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book’s true epiphany. You know you’ve completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.
I am so wrecked already, so unstable, a piece of work who was never given the tools it takes to deal with what everyone else considers business as usual. I am not equipped with any emotional resilience, can’t go with the flow, can’t stand steady while the boat rocks and rolls. Once, so long ago, I had it in me, but now it’s too late. Years of depression have robbed that of me–-well, that *give*, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.
I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word ‘madness’ to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.
Madness is delightful to the beholder, scary in its way, but still fun to watch. A sport for spectators and rubberneckers who can’t avert their eyes from the awfulness that they know they shouldn’t be seeing.
Let’s call it depression and admit that it is very bleak. Sure madness draws crowds, sells tickets, keeps The National Enquirer in business. Yet so many depresses suffer in silence, without anyone knowing, their plight somehow invisible until they adopt the antics of madness which are impossible to ignore. Depression is such an uncharismatic disease, so much the opposite of the lively vibrance that one associates with madness.
Forget about the scant hours in her brief life when Sylvia Plath was able to produce the works in ‘Ariel’. Forget about that tiny bit of time and just remember the days that spanned into years when she could not move, couldn't think straight, could only lie in wait in a hospital bed, hoping for the relief that electroconvulsive therapy would bring.
The atypically depressed are more likely to be the walking wounded, people like me who are quite functional, whose lives proceed almost as usual, except that they’re depressed *all* the time, almost constantly embroiled in thoughts of suicide even as they go through their paces. Atypical depression is not just a mild malaise–which is known diagnostically as *dysthymia* – but one that is quite severe and yet still somehow allows an appearance of normalcy because it becomes, over time, a part of life. The trouble is that as the years pass, if untreated, atypical depression gets worse and worse, and its sufferers are likely to commit suicide out of sheer frustration with living a life that is simultaneously productive and clouded by constant despair.
That’s the problem with reality, that’s the fallacy of therapy: It assumes that you will have a series of revelations, or even just a little one, and that these various truths will come to you and will change your life completely. It assumes that insight alone is a transformative force. But the truth is, it doesn’t work that way. In real life, every day you might come to some new conclusion about yourself and about the reasoning behind your behavior, and you can tell yourself that this knowledge will make all the difference. But in all likelihood, you’re going to keep on doing the same old things. You’ll still be the same person. You’ll still cling to your destructive, debilitating habits because your emotional tie to them is so strong—so much stronger than any dime-store insight you might come up with—that the stupid things you do are really the only things you’ve got that keep you centered and connected. They are the only things about you that make you you.
I didn’t care what state of false consciousness they were able to induce in me through chemicals. … I still think that human beings, even our beautiful and wretched souls, are just biology, are just a series of chemical and physical reactions that one day stop, and so do we, and that is that. But I’m looking forward to this blank peace, this oblivion, this nothing, this not being me anymore. I am looking forward to it for real. …and it never occurs to me until the last possible moment that what I really want is to be saved.
…and I guess I realize that I don’t want to die. I don’t want to live either, but—There really isn’t anything in-between dead and alive, and it’s the worst. “But since the tendency toward inertia means that it’s easier for me to stay alive than die, I guess that's how it’s going to be….
It took a long time for me to get used to my contentedness. It was so hard for me to formulate a way of being and thinking in which the starting point was not depression.
Mental health is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent.
Years and years of bad habits, of being attracted to the wrong kinds of men, of responding to every bad mood with impulsive behavior….. has turned me into a person who had no idea how to function within the boundaries of the normal, nondepressive world.
Depression a very narcissistic thing, it's a self involvement that is so deep and intense that it means the suffer cannot get out of her own head long enough to see what real good, genuine loveliness, there is in the world around her.
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Midnight in the garden of good and evil — john berendt
“Bless their boring little hearts”
“ [he] had two distinct personalities,” he said. “He can switch from one to the other like turning the pages of a book.”
From Atlanta’s point of view, specifically through the eyes of the young Scarlett O’Hara, Savannah and Charleston were “like aged grandmothers fanning themselves placidly in the sun.”
These, then, were the images in the mental gazetteer of Savannah: run-drinking pirates, strong-willed women, courtly manners, eccentric behavior, gentle words, and lovely music. That and the beauty of the name itself: Savannah.
Lady Astor, passing through in 1946, remarked that Savannah was like a “beautiful woman with a dirty face.”
“There’s another wonderful thing about being able to play music,” she said, “It’s something Johnny Mercer told me. He said ‘When you play songs you can bring back people’s memories of when they fell in love. That’s where the power lies.”
“Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.”
I think he was what amounts to a prisoner in a comfortable concentration camp, where the torture was not physical but emotional and psychological
“If I told you that Minerva was a witch doctor or a voodoo priestess, I’d be close,” he said. “She’s that and more. She was the common-law wife of Dr.Buzzard, the last great boohoo practitioner in Beaufort county. Whether you know it or not, you are in the heart of voodoo country.”
Minerva was right behind them carrying here trademark shopping bag. At the top of the steps, she paused while the other went inside; then, after looking around in all directions, she reached into the bag and flung what appeared to be a handful of dirt into the little garden below. She threw another handful down the steps. WIlliams laughed.
“Was that graveyard dirt?” I asked.
“What else?” he said.
“Taken from a graveyard at midnight?”
“When else?”
Minerva went inside the Alders’ house. “What on earth is she doing in there?” I asked.
“Her usual mumbo-jumbo, I suppose,” said Williams. “Twigs, leaves, feathers, exotic powders, chicken bones…”
…he would not even bother to read the news reports, it was all becoming such a bore. “It’s the same old story over and over,” he said, “like re-runs of *I Love Lucy*”
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Loose Girl – a memoir of promiscuity
-”My story is also about addiction. Addiction to power, to the attempt to control others through my body. It is about how desperate I was to feel loved, less alone, and how, misguided by all those cultural mixed messages, I tried to fill my need with male attention and sex. How, as with most addictions, I managed to push most everyone away, foiling my greatest intentions. And finally, how I learned to stop.”
-”But more often, her desire weaves through the house like cobwebs. It takes over the house, inch by dirty inch, until there is no air left to breathe that isn’t filled with her longing.”
-”Her need is ugly and messy, mixed up with mascara tears and groaning, overflowing and seemingly endless.”
-”Plenty of mornings I sat on the closed toilet seat and watched my mother stand at this mirror, cleaning, removing, and applying. It struck me as a lot of work to become presentable, but I liked the busyness of it. I like the idea that I could use the items and become something better than I was. Now it is me at the mirror, applying blush, sucking in my cheeks like I saw her do so many times.”
-”We are a part of this night, this passion, this potential for deep feeling. Anything can happen, anything at all.”
-”I can still feel something like sparks beneath my skin, as thought I’m made of electricity. That power again, coursing through me.”
-”Maybe cute is just one step away from something better, just an angling of the hips or the way I hold my head. I practice different looks in the mirror, seeing what’s possible.”
-”Boys like girls who are quiet, mysterious, who suggest but don’t blurt. I know this, but it’s still so hard for me. The desperation I feel is always too there, too much. I don’t know how to quiet it, a yappy dog that just won’t shut up.”
-”My life is about to change yet again. I close my eyes, seeing how this feels, and I realize I don’t really mind. Change doesn’t scare me. I know about change. I may even like it.”
-”This is my chance to renew who I am, try again to be the self-controlled, mysterious girl, the one who lives by the rules. It’s my first of many attempts to start from scratch in this way, to try again and again to swallow my desperation, claw my way up from under it.”
-”My ritual before a shower is always the same: take off clothes, stand before full-length mirror on the back of my door, curse at my thighs and butt. I have a fantasy I can take scissors and – snip! – slice off the flesh I squeeze back from my bones.”
-”My mother was constantly dieting when I lived with her, never satisfied with her body. She always looked thin to me, but like her I can’t really see what I look like. I rely on what others think, particularly men.”
-”Every item she owns, from toothbrush to kitchen whisk, is a piece of art. She likes to say it’s because she wants to surround herself with beauty, but her need for unique and beautiful things has always struck me as excessive, maybe even frantic.”
-”I’m not really mad at him. I’m mad at myself, that I do these things and then pretend I don’t. I spend half my life lying about who I am and what I want. I don’t even know who I am most of the time.”
-”I lean back, that sick feeling spreading through my body. The feeling of being seen, exposed. My ugly needs giving me away once again. … My wanting makes me unlovable. It’s something I already know.”
-”...wanting the song to make me cry, but it doesn’t. The music only lodges the sorrow more deeply inside.”
-”Jealousy seeps through my skin like water, but I try to act nonchalant.”
-”For a brief moment, I see myself as though from a distance: my wrinkled clothes, my mussed hair, mascara smeared beneath my eyes… I am pitiful, wretched even.”
-”Perhaps this would have been the turning point, the place where I learned my lesson and found a way to love myself. But my desperation was too strong. It was like a tidal wave, pulling me deeper into its current. And the rest of me was not strong enough to fight it.”
-”The truth is I go through my life trying to piece together the family I want, the one I didn’t get.”
-”I haven’t spoken with Mom in almost a month, and I like it that way, keeping her at arm’s length. I could do without the guilt, without the need to always think of her feelings, and to protect my own from her needs.”
-”I wondered, for instance, why almost everyone other than me seemed to be able to have relationships. I could have sex. Oh, yes. But I could not keep a boy’s attention beyond that. Thinking about this opened up a deep hole in my chest, one that seemed to have no bottom. The only answer I could come up with was that I, unlike these other girls, was simply not lovable.”
-”Her sexual power is too raw, too *there*. Worse, she shows no shame for it. It is as though she has taken this narrow list of options for girls–slut or virgin–thrown them out, and come up with her own. …Her attitude is both impressive and terrifying, and no one knows what to make of it.”
-”Every change in my life is exciting and hopeful, an opportunity to start over, to shed my tiresome, needy self and become a lovable person. This change is no different.”
-”There are times I feel like I live in a different universe, as though I am watching other girls through a glass wall, these strange creatures who seem to know how to be loved.”
-”I am sick of myself. Sick of my desperation and emptiness. Sick of the constant defeat. I am convinced if someone will just love me I will be able to focus on something else. I’ll be able to enjoy my life. I’ll feel whole and real, released from this weight.”
-”I’ve been grasping at nothing, running in circles, trying desperately to fill the emptiness inside with nothing but air.”
-”She turns to him with her calm exterior, but I see that there’s something more volatile brewing beneath.”
-”Nights I’m alone, I lie in bed, aching, hating my need, my big nasty need, the thing that makes me unlovable.”
-”Out of his sight, I’m afraid I don’t matter. I hate admitting it. I still experience myself like I did in high school. Without a man loving me, I feel like I don’t exist.”
-”This is where you always are. Trying to get love. Waiting for something always out of reach.”
-”When I can't stand thinking about it anymore, I drive out to the coast. Seagulls sit on the craggy rocks. Pines, permanently shaped by the wind, bend into melodramatic forms.”
-”I’ve learned at this point there’s no shot I can receive, no pill I can take, no therapy I can be a part of that will give me the resolve to do the things I need to do to be loved. It’s a choice. A simple choice. I say I want intimacy. I say I want to be loved. But really, I’m petrified. The straight truth is, I don’t know if I have it in me, and I’m scared to find out that I can’t.”
-”I want to believe I’m different now. I’ve overcome the pain that made me act so impulsively and harmfully. But I don’t really know if that’s the case.”
-”I even try reading a self-help book about how to find love. The gist is that when you can love yourself entirely, only then can others love you too. Duh. Any moron knows that. But *how* to love yourself after a lifetime of self-degradation and effacement? That would be a book with reading.”
-”Some days, I sit in my small apartment with my loneliness, an unwanted guest, the pain intense enough that I keep my arms wrapped around my middle. I can almost envision it in there — a tiny girl with dead eyes, sitting alone in the dark. I hold her tightly, trying to bring her back to life.”
-”I think about her– how, like me, she doesn’t know how to keep love in her life. It pains me to think of her like this, lost and wanting, desperate for love. She’s gone so far into her life, and yet she’s still like a child, tugging on sleeves, pushing people over, trying so very hard to get what she needs. I’m like that too, aren’t I? That little girl inside, clawing her way through life, wanting, always wanting, never ever getting enough to feel filled. It’s so ugly. So profoundly sad and ugly. I don’t want to be like this anymore.”
_________________________
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
-”And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.”
-”In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down; a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest; and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction.”
-”Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid. Tables can be clocks, faces, flowers. … These are facts you find out later.”
-”Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly; at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, a-spin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can’t be discounted.”
-”Scar tissue has no character. It’s not like skin. It doesn’t show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It’s like a slipcover. It shields and disguises what’s beneath. That’s why we grow it, we have something to hide.”
-”[she] had run away again. … The worst was that she was always caught and dragged back, dirty, with wild eyes that had seen freedom.”
-”Suicide is a form of murder– premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. … It’s important to cultivate detachment. … The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you’re sunk.”
-”The debate was wearing me out. Once you’ve posed that question, it won’t go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won’t.”
-”Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark– why not kill myself? Missed the bus– better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie– maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.”
-”Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, every kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.”
-”I wasn’t a danger to society. Was I a danger to myself? The fifty aspirin– but I’ve explained them. They were metaphorical. I wanted to get rid of a certain aspect of my character. I was performing a kind of self-abortion with those aspirin.”
-”...There was a strange undertow, a tug from the other world-– the drifting, drugged-out, no-last-name youth universe— that knocked people off balance.”
-”But I wasn’t simply going nuts, tumbling down a shaft into Wonderland. It was my misfortune— or salvation—to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality. I never *believed* anything I saw or thought I saw. Not only that, I correctly understood each new weird activity.”
-”Now, I would say to myself, you are feeling alienated from people and unlike other people, therefore you are projecting your discomfort onto them. When you look at a face, you see a blob of rubber because you are worried that your face is a blob of rubber.”
-”This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren’t? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn’t see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.”
-”Something had been peeled back, a covering or shell that works to protect us. I couldn’t decide whether the covering was something on me or something attached to every thing in the world. It didn’t matter, really, wherever it had been it wasn’t there anymore.”
-”And this was the main precondition, that anything might be something else. Once I’d accepted that, it followed that I might be mad, or that someone might think me mad. How could I say for certain that I wasn’t, if I couldn’t say for certain that a curtain wasn’t a mountain range?”
-”Our hospital was famous and had housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers, or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?”
-”What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?”
-”I had a character disorder. Sometimes they called it a personality disorder. When I got my diagnosis it didn’t sound serious, but after a while it sounded more ominous than other people’s. I imagined my character as a plate or a shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless.”
-”Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast. … I’m not talking about the duration. I mean the quality of the insanity, the day-to-day business of being nuts. There are a lot of names: depression, catatonia, mania, anxiety, agitation. They don’t tell you much. The predominant quality of the slow form is viscosity. Experience is thick. Perceptions are thickened and dulled. Time is slow, dripping slowly through the clogged filter of thickened perception. The body temperature is low. The pulse is sluggish. The immune system is half-asleep. The organism is torpid and brackish. Even the reflexes are diminished, as if the lower leg couldn’t be bothered to jerk itself out of its stupor when the knee is tapped.”
-”Viscosity occurs on a cellular level. And so does velocity. … In contrast to viscosity’s cellular coma, velocity endows every platelet and muscle fiber with a mind of its own, a means of knowing and commenting on its own behavior. There is too much perception, and beyond the plethora of perceptions, a plethora of thoughts about the perceptions and about the fact of having perceptions.”
-”A lethargic avalanche of synthetic thought can take days to fall. Part of the mute paralysis of viscosity comes from knowing every detail of what’s ahead and having to wait for its arrival.”
-”The world didn’t stop because we weren’t in it anymore…”
-”For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also but off from the demands and expectations that have driven us crazy.”
-”In a strange way we were free. We’d reached the end of the line. We have nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: All of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves.”
-”Plato said everything in the world is just the shadow of some real thing we can’t see. And the real thing isn’t like the shadow, it's a kind of essence thing…”
-”Many of us had spent our hospital years yelling and causing trouble and were ready to move on to something else. All of us had learned by default to treasure freedom and would do anything we could to get it and keep it.”
-”Whatever we call it— mind, character, soul— we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that *animates* us.”
______________________
Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
Reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better.
Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer desk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world.
Some famous fashion photographer telling me how to feel. Him yelling, Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash.
Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.
No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel someday.
Most women know this feeling of being more invisible everyday.
But hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.
The thin and eternal goddess that she is, Brandy's picture smiles up at me over a sea of painkillers. This is how I met Brandy Alexander. This is how I found the strength not to get on with my former life. This is how I found the courage not to pick up the same old pieces.
...the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.
When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.
"You can live a completely normal, regular life." she says. You just can't let anybody get close enough to you to learn the truth.
"You're a product of our language," Brandy says, "and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you," she says. "Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it."
"The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger."
Brandy says, "Don't you see? Because we're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes." ... "I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life." Like Christopher Columbus sailing toward disaster at the edge of the world.
We're so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we're trained to want.
What I hate about [her] is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.
It takes more effort to hate [her] than it used to. My whole life is moving farther away from any reason to hate her. It's moving far away from reason itself. It takes a cup of coffee and a Dexedrine capsule to feel even vaguely pissed about anything.
Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definitely that goes for everybody in the world.
Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
I can see something is different about the girl. It's something European. Something malnourished. It isn't the daily recommended allowance of food and sunshine that make you beautiful by any North American standard.
Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.
It's music as wallpaper, utilitarian, music as Prozac or Xanax to control how you feel.
The music comes out the speaker weak and echoes off the stone until it's moving back and forth in drafts in currents, notes and chords around us. And we're dancing.
The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this.
...you can't believe you're the slave to this body... you can't believe we haven't invented something better. Something not so needy. Not so time consuming.
You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world.
You're going to lose it anyway. Your body. You're already losing it. It's time you bet everything.
Imagine how you'd feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn't stand.
The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.
________
Diary by Chuck Palahniuk
Today the weather is...
You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.
Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless Souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.
Everyone's in their own personal coma.
You need to suffer to make any real art.
Maybe people have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.
You can do this with your mind.
What you don't understand, you can make mean anything.
She's just a regular person who's going to live and die ignored, obscure. Ordinary. That's not such a tragedy.
What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.
Everything you do is a self-portrait.
Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.
____________
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.
This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.
One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer... Maybe self-destruction is the answer.
At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
...both of us knowing we'd gotten somewhere we'd never been and like the cat and mouse in cartoons, we were still alive and wanted to see how far we could take this thing and still be alive.
The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing so she won't commit to anything.
Tyler says I'm nowhere near hitting the bottom, yet. And if I don't fall all the way, I can't be saved... I should run from self-improvement, and I should be running toward disaster.
Only after disaster can we be resurrected. "It's only after you've lost everything," Tyler says, "that you're free to do anything."
"Because everything up to now is a story," Tyler says, "and everything after now is a story." This is the greatest moment of our life.
There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.
Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't.
Nothing is static. Everything is falling apart.
... and I was in a mood to destroy something beautiful.
I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have.
I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.
...and it's not clear if reality slipped into my dream or if my dream is slopping over into reality.
The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.
If you can wake up in a different place. If you can wake up in a different time. Why can't you wake up as a different person?
That old saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.
How everything you ever love will reject or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.
This was better than real life. And your one perfect moment won't last forever. Everything in heaven is white on white. Faker. Everything in heaven is quiet, rubber-soled shoes. I can sleep in heaven. People write to me in heaven and tell me I'm remembered. That I'm their hero. I'll get better.
____________
Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
We're all of us haunted and haunting.
The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact. Even the play-by-play description on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postphoned a couple of seconds. Even sound can only go so fast.
Instead of ethics, I learned only to tell people what they want to hear. I learned to write everything down.
Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.
You turn your music up to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is arms race of sound. You don't win with a lot of treble. This isn't about quality. It's about volume. This isn't about music. This is about winning. You stomp the competition with the bass line. You rattle windows. You drop the melody line and shout the lyrics. You put in foul language and come down hard on each cussword. You dominate. This is really about power.
You'd be surprised just how fast you can close the door on your past. No matter how bad things get, you can still walk away.
There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.
This isn't what a therapist will tell you to do, but it works.
You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception.
The trick to forgetting the big pictures is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God
."Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a hundred years from now?"
In a world where vows are worthless. Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.
____________________________
"Wasted: a memoir of anorexia and bulimia" by Marya Hornbacher
Quotes from “Wasted”:
It is crucial to notice the language we use when we talk about our bodies. We speak as if there was one collected perfect body, a singular entity that we're all after. The trouble is, I think we are after that one body. We grew up with the impression that underneath all this normal flesh, buried deep in the excessive recesses of our healthy bodies, there was a Perfect Body just waiting to break out. It would look exactly like everyone else's perfect body. A clone of the shapeless, androgynous models, the hairless, silicone-implanted porn stars, Somehow we, in defiance of nature, would have toothpick thighs and burgeoning bosoms, buns of steel and dainty firm delts. As Andy Warhol wrote, "The more you look at the same exact thing... the better and emptier you feel."
I was not as I appeared. I liked that. I was a magician. No one could see what I hid underneath, and I didn't want them to, because what I hid seemed raw. Excessively hot and red.
I have had the working assumption, since I was very small, that nothing was as it appeared. Appearances were not to be trusted. In fact, nothing was to be trusted. Things existed in layers, and under the layer lay another layer... Everything was about context. Everything was costume and makeup, and the role that one played.
You can, perhaps, forsee a serious of terrifically dramatic relationships in my future, all ending with me in an Ophelian heap in my quilt. I had a love affair with books, with the characters and their worlds. Books kept me company. When the voices of the book faded, as with the last long chord of a record, the back cover crinkling closed, I could swear I heard a door click shut.
I stayed at home to read and eat, or more accurately, to be fed-passive tense-and to disappear into the world in my head, the world I read of in books. ... the kind of book that might stave off the world at large a bit longer than the others. I was perpetually grief-stricken when I finished a book, and would slide down from my sitting position on the bed, put my cheek on the pillow and sigh for a long time.
Food has two salient qualities for all humans. First, it stirs a sense of nurturance. The physical food transubstantiates in our minds into something more ethereal, of human and emotional nurturance, a sense that our hungers are being sated. Even if you are just stuffing handfuls of fries into your mouth on a binge, you still feel that some emptiness, if briefly, is being filled. Second, food has a simple, chemical effect of calming the brain. Food gave me a sense that things were going to be all right. That if I just ate things in a precise fashion, if I just ate special foods-mushrooms soup, toast, tortillas with cheese, scrambled eggs-my brains would stay still, the world would stop spinning, and I would have a focal point for my eyes: the book beside the plate, the food, the project at hand. Things would remain calm.
Be whatever you want, but don't let anyone see. Perfect the surface. Learn your lines. Sit up straight. Use the right fork, put your napkin on your lap, say excuse me, say please, smile for chrissakes, smile, stop crying, quit whining, quit asking why, because I said so dammit, don't talk back to me, watch your mouth, missy, behave yourself, control yourself. I always had this mental image of me, spilling out of the shell of my skin, flooding the room with tears.
My systems... were systems that acted as a buffer between me and the world. My focus on the minutiae calmed me. It was a simple reasoned refusal to look up at the larger world, which always seemed to dilate my pupils, making me squint and shy from the glare.
...I was always vaguely nervous, as if something was looming, something dark and threatening, some deeper place in the water, a place that was silent and cold. ...People made me nervous. I preferred to stay in my bedroom with the door shut tight, dresser shoved up against it..., and curl into the corner of my bed with a book.
(regarding committing to getting better)
-- My terms amount to cultural heresy. I had to say: I will eat what I want and look as I please and laugh as loud as I like and use the wrong fork and lick my knife. I had to learn strange and delicious lessons, lessons too few women learn: to love the thump of my steps, the implication of weight and presence and taking of space, to love my body's rebellious hungers, responses to touch, to understand myself as more than a brain attached to a bundle of bones.
A strange equation, and an altogether too-common belief: One's worth is exponentially increased with one's incremental disappearance.
...Forgetting who you are and where you are and if you're there. Getting lost in the thought that you might be imagining everything, you might be dreaming your life. You look at your hand in front of your face, surrounded by light, and your heart thrums as you think: I'm dreaming, I'm not even here, I don't exist. It is too fascinating, the thought that you aren't.
It's never over. Not really. Not when you stay down there as long as I did... You never come back, not all the way. Always, there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier, thin as the glass of a mirror. You never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.
We are incredibly perfectionistic. We often excel in school, athletics, artistic pursuits. We also tend to quit without warning. Refuse to go to school, drop out, quit jobs, leave lovers, move, lose all our money. We get sick of being impressive. Rather, we tired of having to SEEM impressive. As a rule, most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place. I got tired of the feeling that I was constantly onstage, wearing someone else's clothes, saying someone else's lines. I quit the charade...
There is an empty space in many of us that gnaws at our ribs and cannot be filled by any amount of food. There is a hunger for something, and we never know quite what it is, only that it is a hunger, so we eat... There is also a larger, more ominous huger, and I was and am not alone in sensing it. It squirms under the sternum, clawing at the throat.
Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be all right.
A few too many of us fell for the old romantic story of the mad artist, the genius made idiot savant by the swells and falls of music, language, color on canvas, ceaselessly, manically, playing inside his head. We wanted to be that genius, that idiot mad with the world of his mind. A thrum of self-destruction, anger, and joy all tangled up, ran through the halls, the roads, the dorms...
There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.
You go insane about now. You understand, it just happens. Crazy isn't always what they say it is. It's not always the old woman wearing sneakers and a skirt and a scarf, wandering around with a shopping cart, hollering at no one, nothing, tumbling through years in her head. No. Sometimes it is a girl wearing boots and jeans and a sweater, arms crossed in front of her, shivering, wandering through the streets at night, all night, murmuring to no one, nothing, tumbling through the strange unreal dimensions in her head.
Something else was going on, some poison had crept into my blood. In my mind, things go dark: The colors of this time are deep and pervasive, blood reds and shadows, dark rooms, dark halls, a very dark desire.
________________________________________
"MADNESS: A Bipolar Life" by Marya Hornbacher
I gasp and let out a sigh. I gaze at [him]. I adore him. He is the most wonderful person alive. I am suddenly struck by the fact that he is unlike anyone else in the world. How many people could love me like this? ... Who could? Who would? Why would they? Why does [he]?
That's what madness looks like: a small woman in baggy red pajamas sitting on a kitchen chair, her feet dangling above the ground, trying to figure out how to eat and eclair while everyone she knows and loves watches her closely, as if she's a rat in a cage, to see what will happen next...
She wouldn't understand that I am chosen to speak for all the sorrows of the world.
I come bounding up the steps in front of our house: the lilac is blooming! I rush into it, fling my arms around it, bury my face in the heavy-scented flowers. I look over at the garden: the snow is gone, and the beds are bare but for the broken gray stalks and dead leaves that fall left behind, but the lawn is green, and a few bulbs have sent up tiny shoots, barely there, and there are two absurd yellow tulips, blooms bobbing in the soft spring breeze, it's spring. And with spring comes the joy that lives beneath the difficult times. The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.
But I do my best. I go home to my empty condo, buy some real food, and eat like a normal person. I pay the bills that have piled up, return the phone calls, get back to work. I write the lectures that I'm scheduled to give at a couple universities in February and March. It's winter. Winter brings the blues. I'm afraid of them coming, and I know they will. My only hope is that I can get through the winter without going back to the hospital. If I can do this, then maybe I can stop hating myself. I think, if I just keep going, keep doing what they say, take the meds, go to sleep, use the light box, get out of the house, get some exercise, eat enough, try to avoid stress, then maybe I can do it. They don't tell you how to manage grief. And I miss Jeff so much it's killing me. But there's nothing I can do about that now. All I can do is keep going forward. Maybe this way I can make it to April. Just this once.
I don't know how long I've been in my house. It's dark. Last I checked it was day. I think I've thrown up seven times today. I'm so dehydrated I can barely walk, and I'm crawling down the hall. The eating disorder has gotten too bad. It's not working. I see it for what it is: an attempt to control a self that I felt was completely out of control, a life that was falling apart. And it has done nothing but make the bipolar worse, and ruin my body in the process.
"I'm okay," I say. "They're just thoughts. I don't have a plan." The doctors always ask if you're having suicidal ideation -thinking about death, fantasizing about killing yourself, even when you don't want to - which I am, and if so, whether or not you have a plan, which I don't. I know myself well enough to realize that if we went to the emergency room, I would miraculously get better. I would show no signs of madness. It's called plausible sanity. It's a product of what they call lack of insight: when you're very sick, you don't have any perspective. You truly believe you're well, so you report that you're well. You act cheerful, put-together, and completely sane. You're articulate and very persuasive, and you explain to them that there's been a terrible mistake - you're not really crazy, and this ridiculous trip to the hospital is just a friend over reacting, or your family trying to trap you, or your spouse trying to get back at you for something...
Soon the hypomania morphs into something dark. The eating disorder has taken hold for real. It's no longer just a few symptoms I was using to try to control the moods. It's taken on a life of its own. I am eating next to nothing, spending hours every day at the gym, standing on the scale four, five times a day, consumed with the fear of gaining weight, with the fear that the writing is going badly, with the fear that Jeff and I aren't going to make it, with the fear that I will always be alone, or go crazy again, or spend my life in an institution. So I channel all the vague, amorphous, all-encompassing fears that have come to rule my days and nights into a fierce desire to lose weight. And more weight.
The feeling of confidence I got from moving into my own place and doing everything right has been replaced with the familiar, violent self-hatred I know. I had everything, and I lost it. Instead of hating the illness, I hate myself.
Soon madness has worn you down. It's easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you, no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says you're worthless, you agree. You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs.
But sometimes the system fails. Maybe it's a chemical shift in the brain that the medications don't block. Maybe it's a stressor in your life that you didn't expect. Maybe there is no reason, and you're just going mad for the hell of it, but you try not to think about that because that would imply that no matter what you do, no matter how rightly you batten the hatches, madness can get in.
I'm trying to be perfect, and the smallest failure - say I don't wash a dish - becomes cause for rage at myself for being such a fucking waste of space. I work too much, sleep too little, shop compulsively, and I'm dizzy with grief. I swing from elation at my new life to despair at what I've lost and hatred of who I was. So I race away from all that, convince myself everything is wonderful, block the world with obsessions, manic activity, long days of work, and shopping. I fixate on things. And one of the things I fixate on is food. I suppose it had to happen sometime. Recovery from an eating disorder is usually provisional - most of us who do recover still have it lurking somewhere in the back of our minds. It lives there quietly for years. But if the pressure is enough, it comes out. We fall back on it. It is as old and familiar as a longtime lover. We aren't afraid of it. It stills our thoughts. We know it. When we are at points in our lives where we know little else, the eating disorder is our long-lost oldest friend.
Memory is not all that's lost to madness. There are other kinds of damage, to the people in your life, to your sense of who you are and what you can do, to your future and the choices you'll have. But there are some things gained. The years that have follow my decision to manage my mental illness have been challenging, sometimes painful, sometimes lovely. The life I live, even the person I am, is nearly unrecognizable compared to the life I had when madness was in control. There are things in common, obviously - my mental illness hasn't gone anywhere, and it still, to some extent, shapes my every day. But my constant effort to learn to live with it, and live well, has changed the way I see it, they way I handle it, and it's probably changed me.
But memory erased by madness is memory one relies on to make sense of one's life. I have precise memories of conversations, crystal-clear recall of books I've read, and a blow-by-blow memory of everything that happened in one year, then nothing for the next two. I piece my life together from stories other people tell me, from journals and photos, from sitting with my head in my heads, searching for anything until I can get a dim picture of a face, a vague memory of something I know has happened but that I have to reconstruct from the wreckage of my mind.
Some people with bipolar have only one major episode, or have several and then go into remission and live years without them ever coming back. ...But they can't say how often, or when it will happen next. So I have two choices: I live in constant fear that the next episode is just around the corner, waiting to attack; or live as if by doing the right things to keep myself well, the episodes will never come back again. And what if they don't? I can't picture it. I can't imagine life without the thrills, the flights and the crashes, the constant chaos that has rules me, fascinated me, tormented me, since I was a child. I can't imagine reining my mind, and my day-to-day pace. If I do, what will fill my days, what will inspire me, occupy my thoughts, drive my life, push me to go on? But I'm tired. The doctors offer me a paradox: tame the madness through surrender. Accept that it will be chained to me, pulling, always trying to get loose, for the rest of my life - but also know that if I respect the strength of the madness, I can live in some kind of peace. Only then will it, instead of me, tire out, and sleep.
I can finally be out of bed for long stretches at a time before my brain shuts down - a few hours in the morning, a few in the late afternoon, and most of the evening. Leaning on walls, in the kitchen counter, the door, my family and friends, I begin to do the things that have gone undone. There are fewer visits from my babysitters, who have been keeping me company so I don't get lost in my moods. Soon, the babysitters won't come at all. I'll be left to my own devices and thoughts, thoughts that seem to be generated by my own mind rather than by some demon alter ego. I get dressed some day, brave the downstairs, and sometimes even go outside. Finally, I begin to write, a little bit most days. When I can write all day, and write decently, and remember what I've written, and wake up in the morning and do it again, I know I'm well.
She's got a point. There are millions and millions of people with mental problems. They work regular jobs, irregular jobs, they work at home, they don't work, they're married or single, they have kids or don't, they do laundry and fall in love and have opinions and grieve their losses and, if they're lucky, take their meds. That's what I'm learning. I am a person with a mental illness. So it takes some extra effort. So sometimes it's debilitating. But now that I'm learning to manage it, it's becoming not my entire life but simply a part of how I live, something the people around me live with as well, something I can accept. I have to. That's the only way this works.
After a week or so of my lying in bed, the cobwebs in my brain start to clear and I venture back into the wreckage of my office, a whirlwind of paper and books. For the seventh time in two years, I put things in their places, stack the papers, re-shelve the books. I look at my desk calendar, still open to the date I went in. The pages are almost unreadable, crammed with black scribbles, the notes I'd taken on the cesspool of my mind, the dozens of appointments I'd made in my frenzy to cram my days full of the endless things I wanted to do, believed I could do - get PhD, write new book, go to London, start advocacy group. It's not that I couldn't do these things - people with bipolar disorder do things like this all the time. But each item on my list was cooked up in a fit of mania, when anything is possible. In any case, I don't even necessarily want to do these things, now that I've come down. I turn the page to the correct date, smooth my hand over it, and think for a minute. Jeff comes in. "Whatcha doing?" he asks. I look up at him. "Starting over," I say. "All right," he replies, and jogs back downstairs.
The conversation gets louder and louder, we laugh until we fall out of our chairs. I'm at my most charismatic, my grand schemes seem perfectly reasonable. Mania is contagious, pulling people into its whirlwind orbit. I'm the pied piper. There's nothing wrong with me. Absolutely everyone is crazy. I'm riding the swell of excitement with everyone else. The party breaks up around four o'clock in the morning, and at six I hop out of bed and keep moving. Work has never been better. I've never written faster, never worked so hard. It's fucking great. Madness? This isn't madness. This is more fun than I've had in years. Why would I want to come down? This is just how it is now, this is how it's always supposed to be - I've hit my stride, and I just didn't realize how painfully slow I'd been going before. Everything before, phsaw. That was nothing. Ladies and gentleman, you've never seen anything like it. Watch this
I have no idea what comes out of my mouth. I have no idea how I wound up here. I say something that is apparently coherent, and now people are clapping. It dawns on me that they think I am a real person. And now that I think of it, I look like a real person. I see myself through their eyes: I am dressed in real-person clothes. I have a real-person job. I drove here in a car that I own. I drove here from a house that I own, which also contains my husband... The wild years are over... I'm not crazy anymore, and here I am, a new person with a real life at last.
Jeff swings me around when he comes home. I am wearing an apron, laughing, and Jeff is kissing me. We are in a movie... No one will want to watch it but us, but we watch it, amazed. I dance around the kitchen with my spatula and tell him. My day was perfect. I did everything right. I wrote a new chapter. I did laundry and folded it and put it away. I got the mail and paid the bills. I went to the store and came home and carried the groceries up all by myself. I had coffee with a friend, and the Johnsons are coming for dinner, we're having pasta, and salad, and I made bread and I bought five kinds of cheese, and olives, and for dessert a blueberry lemon tart. The crust is from scratch. The pasta is homemade. I made three kinds of sauce so people can choose. ... This is the nature of bipolar: when the episodes end, it's back to the regular world, and the regular world looks like heaven. ...My mood has leveled out. My family is breathing a little easier. Jeff seems to be the rock that will keep my grounded for good. He treats me like a queen, a miracle, and for the first time I am loved not for the constant excitement, the insane passion that always drew men in and then, of course, pushed them away, not for how I look or what I do, but for who I am, quirks and strangeness and flaws and all. In the circle of his love, I can finally relax, breathe easy, love him back with everything I've got. And for the first time, I have something to give.
He's the kind of man who wouldn't have come near me with a ten-foot pole even a year ago. He has no time for flashy scenes. He wears green wool sweaters and sensible brown boots. There is no other word for him than kind. He's exactly who he says he is. He fascinates me. I watch him while he sleeps, wanting to take him apart and see how he's made. He snores like a freight train. He is tangible, solid. He holds down the bed. With him here, the roof isn't always flying off. With him here, needing my presence, I understand for the first time what it means to be good to someone. It's the first time I have ever been unselfish in my life. He needs something I have, so I give it to him. Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love. We tumble into a life together just like that. We go from starry-eyed to angry to companionable in the space of a few weeks. In February, we go back to Minneapolis. His depression has lifted. In April, we buy an old Victorian near one of the city lakes. One Sunday, we're sitting at breakfast and decide to get married. So we do.
I do tell him I have bipolar, and joking say that he might want to think twice about getting involved with me. In fact, I give him a list of a hundred and one reasons not to date me, and bipolar is at the top of the list. I feel like I'm poisonous. So I give him my disclaimer, and hope for the best...
I am sitting on the porch swing of the little rented house in Minneapolis... I'm swinging a little, watching the cars go by. I am holding myself carefully, like an egg. I am fragile, barely there. I imagine I am transparent, that you can see right through me to the screen behind, and the oak tree beyond that, and the little green house beyond that. I take extreme caution when breathing. I hold very still so that I will not upset the tenuous balance of my mind, tip it on its side, send my thoughts sliding all over again. Time barely moves. The world quivers around me. I step carefully through it, not touching anything. The dust on the porch must not be disturbed. This is the world. I am trying not to take up very much space or make any noise, because there is a kind of silence that bewilders and fascinates me, and I am afraid of my voice. I am afraid of myself, the self that was mad. The madness sleeps under the house, its scaly tail over its nose. I walk carefully in the house, placing my feet one in front of the other, making sure the floor doesn't creak.
Fall rolls into winter. The trees give up the last of their leaves and I watch snow fall past my window, collecting in perfect drifts on the black branches. If you put a camera in my room, you could watch the seasons pass in time-lapse. You could see me too, lying in bed, lying on the floor, sitting on the edge of the bed, always staring into space.
My head has become a kaleidoscope. It turns and turns, and the shards of color tumble and arrange themselves differently every time.
If only things would stay simple: the sound of the foghorns at night, the wild calla lilies that grow along the fence, the cool sharp god that wraps around my face and throat. But it isn't that kind of summer. And this time I have a partner in madness. Madness will push you anywhere it wants. It never tells you where you're going, or why. It tells you it doesn't matter. It persuades you. It dangles something sparkly before you, shimmering like that water watch on the road up ahead. You will drive until you find it, the treasure, the thing you most desire. You will never find it. Madness may mock you so long you will die of the search. Or it will tire of you, turn its back, oblivious as you go flying.
My life is a nightmare. The affairs are a nightmare. The stress is a nightmare. The book is late. I'm turning into a monster. I don't care about anything. I feel like I'm going to explode. It never lets up. I feel like I'm choking on it.
We are coming in and out. We are a radio station. We are a short wave. We are the news.
When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you. Sean and I know that what we see is true, and real. We know that we have each finally stumbled on the one other person who understands this, and we know that what we believed before was an impoverished, colorless misapprehension of what actually is. We wonder at the miracle that is us.
... the perfect union of minds that we have found. Our minds have reached a pinnacle of perception, and we see things the way no one else can see them, and the way we see them is the way they really are. It is decided that we will leave. We will run away. We will go to the desert, where nothing can touch us, where the lives we hate will be forgotten, escaped. We will find ourselves a map. We will find our way.
The point is the driving. It's the cheap motel, the dust, the sweaty salty, dirty skin, it's the wind in the window, it's the water, it's the map, which is for tracing where we have been, not where we are going. Morning, we start driving in any direction, to see what there is to see, to see where we end up next. We collect the names of towns like children collect rocks. We mark them on our map, which is spread out on the beaded motel bedspread or on the burning hood of the car, heads together, we are HERE, we say, and HERE, and HERE, we trace our path with a red pen, fingernails stubby and filthy. In the car, we're propelled by some weird force. Our feet are heavy on the pedal. The place back there fades in the rearview and we fly into the arms of something fantastical, more real than real.
I work like mad. I spend less and less time with the old shiny scene or even my close friends. I work so hard I think I'll die. My brain physically hurts at the end of the night. It's an incredible high. This is how it should be. Once again, I have a future. The hours writing and in school let me ignore, for a little while, the lifelong feeling of failure. Because, no matter what other people might think when they look at my life, I can't see, have never been able to see, anything like success. It doesn't matter what I do, what I publish, what the critics say, what people tell me. None of it feels like mine. Nothing I've ever done feels real. It's as if books and articles have just sprouted up in my house one morning, someone else's, mistakenly bearing my name.
I put my head down on the table and cry. Because it's happened again. I'm found out. I'm damaged. Fucked up. Broken. A fraud. I knew he would figure out sooner or later that I was impossible to love. And now he has, and I love him, and I'm certain he has tried, really tried, to love me back. But trying to love me is too much for any sane person to bear. I watch their backs, one by one, as they walk away.
Two o'clock. I feel it coming. My fingers slow, then stop. I stare at what I've written, slump in my chair. Where did it come from? Where did it go? My mind drags itself around in a circle and finally lies down. My chest empties out. I push back from my desk, go into the bedroom, crawl under the covers, and curl up in a ball, praying that Jeremy doesn't come home and catch me like this. I swear to myself that I'll be out of bed by five. But the idea of ever getting out of bed again exhausts me and I close my eyes, wanting to sleep, but sleep doesn't come. I lie there, hating myself, for hours. My eyes snap open. I must have dozed. I throw the cover off and swing my legs out of the bed, glance at the clock - it's five! It's evening, the day is done, the night is here, it's time for a drink! I leap up, race for the shower, stand there singing, the cold water shivering me out of my fog. I leap out again, run through the house into my closet, what to wear, what to wear? I must look like I've been up all day, productive, working, just like everybody else, and I race into the kitchen, open a bottle of wine, and start chopping things for the fabulous dinner I'll make for my fabulous boyfriend when he comes in and we begin the fabulous evening, which will never end...
I drag myself out of bed, stand with my head against the cupboards in the kitchen, pouring coffee, trying to shake the cobwebs out of my brain. I go into my office - a glorified closet - and sit down at the desk and stare at the computer screen, dreading the day. A few hours later, my fingers are racing over the keys, my head spinning with words, I'm elated, laughing out loud, jabbering to myself - this new life is beauty itself, it's heaven, I'm finally happy, in love, blessed, and I race through the hours unaware of time's passage, ears ringing, alive.
Everything this year is amplified: the colors, the sounds, the sense that I'm caught up in something much larger than I am, something fabulous, something grand. Everything is tactile, the taste of the wine, the feel of the excellent fabric, the hell of the fabulous shoe, the thrum of the road under the wheels of the car. And it's California, where everything is powerfully strange. Everyone wants it to be home. Everyone left where he or she was from with dreams of transformation. Everyone runs away to California once, or at least all the lonely, hungry people do. The sharp scent of eucalyptus and sea salt stings the nostrils and fills the lungs. I have to breathe deeply to soak it all in. I draw the deep breath again and again, and it is never enough. The breathing makes me dizzy. I stagger around, elated, half mad. The place is manic. The time is manic. I fit right in.
Time has slowly spun to a stop and hangs in the air. It is an effort to move one's limbs, turn one's head, due to the thick invisible fog of unmoving time. The lazy days bleed into one another like watercolors left out in the rain. And so I lie here on my side, heavily, pressed down by time. Stay here, says time. Don't move. If you move, time will pass, this will disappear.
It's a carnival, California in these years. The neon lights that blur in the rain and seem to smear across the sky; the open doors of bars spewing out laughing, shouting people and sucking more of them back in; the thundering, pounding bass in the clubs that seems to shake the street outside. And the parties, and the darling little restaurants, and the spectacular lofts, with their to-die-for views of the city and the bay, and the gorgeous clothes, the witty dinner guests, the third man, the hipsters, the scene, the endless, ever-present players playing their incessant little games, the stakes as high as a fortune to be made or lost overnight, or as small as getting the haughtiest woman in the room into bed or just getting the man of hour's card, Call me sometime, and the academics with their scruffy beards and their incestuous fucking and fighting, and the poets and the writers, and the suicidal musicians, and Starbucks and eyeglasses so ugly they're fabulous, and the knighting of nerds, and the ever-shrinking cell phones, and the endless strings of degrees, Harvard? Berkeley? Yale?, and the money - good God, the money, rents skyrocketing, people paying their rent in stock options, IPO parties every night, twenty two-year-olds driving around in identical black BMW convertibles, and the soup de grace, the stunning success, the hot new kid, the spidery bodies, the buffed-up shoulder straining at too-tight black T-shirts, worn with fabulously ironic pants, and the terribly cool clunky square-toed shoes, and the fat wads of cash, the sterling silver money clips, the limitless credit cards, and the weekend trips up to the wine country, in the convertible, with the gang, and the wine tasting and the wine collecting, and the art scene, and the hot new artist, and his lover, and their debacle, and the spectacle, and the debauch, and the grabbing at more, more of anything, everything, give it to us, we want it, all of it, where is my server, my dish is cold, drop by for drinks, we'll lunch, call me, she said she'd call me, he'll call me, shoot me an email, I'll shoot you an email, hey, good to meet you, glad-handing, kissing the trembling air near the eye, let's go down to the club, crowd in, scoot over, this is so-and-so, we should play squash, murmur to the waiter, Bring a round, slip him a hundred, and now the gang's all here, and we are going to do what we do, which is dance, and drink, and devour one another whole.
... In class, I fool everyone into thinking I'm real. But then I come home after school to the empty, hollow house, wrap into a ball in the corner of the couch, a horrible, clutching, sinking feeling in my chest. Nothing matters, and nothing will ever be all right again. I go into rages at the slightest thing, pitching things around the house, running away in the middle of the night, my feet crunching across the frozen lake. I cling to the cold chain link fence of the bridge across the freeway and watch the late-night cars flash by, my breath billowing out into the dark in white gusts.
Nothing is going fast enough. At school, the teachers are talking as if their mouths are full of molasses. Their limbs move in slow motion. Pointing to call on someone, the teachers lifts her arms as if it is filled with wet sand. I swear to God I think I am going insane, it is so slow, while my thoughts whistle past like the wind, so fast I can barely keep up. I turn my mind inward to watch them. They move in electric currents, crackling, spitting, sending out red sparks.
My chest floods with a mixture of horror and relief. The relief comes first: something in me sits up and says, It's true. He's right, he has to be right. This is it. All the years I've felt tossed and spit up by the forces of chaos, all that time I've felt as if I am spinning away from the real world, the known world, off in my own aimless orbit- all of it, over. Suddenly the solar system snaps into place, and at the center is this sun; I have a word. Bipolar. Now it will be better. Now it has a name, and if it has a name, it's a real thing, not merely my imagination gone wild. If it has a name, if it isn't merely an utter failure on my part, if it's a disease, bipolar disorder, then it has an answer. Then it has a cute. At least something that SHOULD HELP.
We go to concerts and plays, and never once do I let on that sometimes the music turns colors in my mind, veering toward me, making me flinch. I laugh at the funny parts and clap when everyone claps, even if I'm confused, disoriented, scared.
I am writing a poem. I am only vaguely aware of myself: the point is the poem. To the effort I contribute the mechanism of my mind: the cogs and wheels groan and begin to chug along. They move faster, sending out a conveyor belt of neatly packaged words. A story, a poem begins to take shape. Pages pile up. I scribble and gnaw on my fingers, getting blood and spit on the paper. The pages are a product of my body. I can touch them. I can eat them if I want. I worry their edges, rip at their corners, throw them to my right as I finish each one, the letters running up to the edge and spilling off onto the desk until I get another piece of paper and continue recording the automatic generation of language from my mind. As the sky outside my window turns from black to midnight blue, as thin clouds stretch across the indigo sky like someone lying on her side, I hurry: morning is almost here. I race to get down the last of the words. The lights comes up. I push myself away from the desk, unclench the fist that held the pen, stagger off to bed, fall into a thick, drunken sleep.
*The world outside swells and presses in at the walls, trying to reach me, trying to eat me alive. I must stay here in the pocket of my sheets, with my blanket and my book. I will not face the world with its lights and noise, its confusion, the way I lose myself in its crowds. The way I disappear. I am the invisible girl. I am make-believe. I am not really there.
*...when I've been running around like a maniac, laughing like crazy, or while I get lost in my words, my mouth running off ahead of me, spilling the wild, lit-up stories that race through my head, or when I burst out in raging fits that end with me sobbing hysterically and beating my fists on my head or my desk or my knees. Then I look up suddenly, and everyone's staring. And I brighten up, laugh my happiest laugh, to show them I was just kidding, I'm really not like that, and everyone laughs along.
*The past few years have seen me in ever-increasing flights and falls of mood, my mind at first lit up with flashes of color, currents of electric insight, sudden elation, and then flooded with black and bloody thoughts that throw me face-down onto my livingroom floor, a swelling despair pressing outward from the center of my chest, threatening to shatter my ribs. I have ridden these moods since I was a child, the clatter of the roller coaster roaring in my ears while I clung to the sides of my little car. But now, at the edge of adulthood, the madness has entered me for real. The thing I have feared and railed against all my life - the total loss of control over my mind - has set in, and I have no way to fight it anymore.
"White Oleander" by Janet Fitch
1. "Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind."
2. Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife.
3. "Always learn poems by heart," she said. "They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay."
4. Beauty was my mother's law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren't, you just didn't exist.
5. Only peons made excuses for themselves, she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.
6. I hungered for Barry, I thought he might be the one, someone who could feed us and hold us and make us real.
7. ...went downstairs and swam in the pool warm as tears.
8. I wanted to freeze this moment forever... I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck.
9. She was breaking her rules. They weren't stone after all, only small and fragile as paper cranes.
10. She wrote tiny haiku that she slipped into his pockets.
11. Passion. I never imagined it was something that could happen to her. These were days she couldn't recognize herself in a mirror, her eyes black with it, her hair forever tangled...
12. My mother couldn't sleep, she jumped whenever the phone rang. I hated to see the look on her face when it wasn't Barry. A tone I'd never heard crept into her voice, serrated, like the edge of a saw.
13. It was the final impossibility.
14. Now I wished she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face...
15. Her eyes were strange, circled dark like bruises, and her hair was greasy and lank. She lay on her bed, or stared at herself in the mirror. "How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?"
16. "Honey, this is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster."
17. "A jewel is forming inside my body. No, it's not my heart. This is harder, cold and clean."
18. She no longer spoke the language I did.
19. "Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness."
20. How it was that the earth could open up under you and swallow you whole, close above you as if you never were.
21. I slept until sleep seemed like waking and waking like sleep.
22. The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plain blue cloudless sky and a certian silence, but how do you pray to that?
23. It felt good to be held. I breathed in his smell, cigarettes and stale body and beer and fresh-cut wood, something green.
24. My mother was a woman people stopped in the marker to wonder at... just at the sheer beauty. They seemed startled she had to shop and eat like anyone else.
25. ...but her blue eyes were as clear as a high note on a violin.
26. If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one's own universe, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth cliches lent us from the so-called Fathers.
27. If you were really strong, you could have tolerated the humiliation.
28. And I thought, this was what it was like to be beautiful... The tug of eyes, pulling you back from your flight to the target... He was taking my silence but giving me something in return, a fullness of being recognized. I felt beautiful, but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.
29. ...that silhouette, a form comprised of all I did not know, a shape filled with rain.
30. They looked like they were sitting in a special patch of sunlight, an aura of beauty around them.
31. I sat on the bed, praying to the voice in the rain... The only answer was rain. Silence and tears. Nothing.
32. And I liked the way she flinched, knowing I had caused the lines in her forehead. There was power in me now, where there had been none.
33. ...she watched my every move, every gesture. I wasn't used to being watched, it made me feel important. I sensed a layer of myself had been peeled off that day in her bedroom, and what was under it glowed.
34. Shooting stars hurled themselves into the empty spaces, burned up. Just for the pleasure of it. Just like this. I could have swallowed the night whole.
35. A person didn't need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn't help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I'd take it.
36. I was the center of my own universe, it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around me, and I liked the way he looked at me.
37. I tried to imagine Ray in a two-and-a-half-bath life, dinner on the table at six, the regular job, the wife, the kid. But I couldn't.
38. I put my hands around his waist, pressed my face into the scratchy wool between his shoulder blades... I closed my eyes and breathed in his scent, dope and sweat and new wood.
39. He turned and held me. It was precisely how I had wanted to be held, all my life -- by strong arms and a broad, wool-shirted chest smelling of tobacco and pot.
40. This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives. That they didn't want their mothers to come running after them, begging their forgiveness, that they wouldn't have gone down on their knees and thanked God if they could stay.
41. ... we set the air on fire between us.
42. He pulled a bouquet of paper flowers out of the air and gave them to me with a courtly bow, and I thought love was like that, pulled out of the air, something bright and unlikely.
43. My days passed in a haze of Percodan. Bells and desks, shuffling to the next class. The teachers' mouths opened and butterflies burst out, too fast to capture.
44. Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space.
45. Just make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.
46. I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.
47. What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.
48. "It's magic, Astrid. You have to know how to reach up and pull beauty out of thin air."
49. "The secret is -- a magician doesn't buy magic. Admire the skill of a fellow magician, but never fall under his spell."
50. "Love's an illusion. It's a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt."
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"The Virgin Suicides" by jeffrey eugenides
Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.
"Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly."
We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.
They receded from us, from the other girls, from their father, and we caught sight of them standing in the courtyard, under drizzle, taking bites from the same doughnut, looking up at the sky, letting themselves get slowly drenched.
He began to weep, looking out from the garage, as music filled the street like air. "It was the kind of music they play when you die," he said.
It occurred to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancy in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, "Don't waste your time on life."
Later, when other acquaintances chose to end their lives-- sometimes even borrowing a book the day before-- we always pictured them as taking off cumbersome boots to enter the highly associative mustiness of a family cottage on a dune overlooking the sea. Every one of them had read the signs of misery Old Mrs. Karafilis had written, in Greek, in the clouds. On different paths, with different-colored eyes or jerkings of the head, they had deciphered the secret to cowardice or bravery, whichever it was. And the Lisbon girls were always there before them. They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
But this is all a chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decision better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. Her brain going dim to all else, but flaming up at precise points of pain, personal injury, lost dreams. Every other loved one receding as though across a vast ice floe, shrinking to black dots waving tiny arms, out of hearing. Then the rope thrown over the beam, the sleeping pill dropped in the palm with the long, lying lifeline, the window thrown open, the oven turned on, whatever. They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. And we had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them, we had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
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Excerpts from THE JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH
“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotion as that person, but I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time..." (p. 9)
"There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggestion by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century..." (p. 15-16)
“There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, of trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.” ( p. 20)
“How complex and intricate are the working of the nervous system. The electric shrill of the phone sends a tingle of expectancy along the uterine walls; the sound of his voice, rough, brash and intimate across the wire tightens the intestinal tract. If the substituted the word “Lust for “Love” in popular songs it would come nearer the truth.” (p. 21)
“If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad. There is so much, and I am torn in different directions, pulled thin, taut against horizons too distant for me to reach” (p. 27)
“Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self -- like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.” (p.29)
“I can’t deceive myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how much that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future, which after all, is all the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. But the cold reasoning mass of gray entrail in my cranium which parrots “I think, therefore I am,” whispers that there is always the turning, the upgrade, the new slant. And so I wait. What avail are good looks? To grab temporary security? what avail are brains? Merely to say “I have seen; I have comprehended?”...” (p.30)
“Here I am, a bundle of of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through. I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception. And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow two-dimensional living - a set of values” (p. 31)
“We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out through the yellow stinking mist, just what lies below the slime, in the oozing vomit-streaked; and so I could go on, into my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself” (p.32)
“I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I. I am sitting at my desk looking out at a bright antiseptic January day, with an icy wind whipping the sky into a white-and-blue froth… I can see the sun light slanting diagonally across the desk, catching on the iridescent filaments of nylon in the stockings I hung over the curtain rod to dry. I think I am worthwhile just because I have optical nerves and can try to put down what they perceive” (p. 34)
“...Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God - the universal woman-and-man-- or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way. But if I am to express what I am, I must have a standard of life, a jumping-off place, a technique - to make arbitrary and temporary organization of my own personal and pathetic little chaos.” (p. 45)
“I believe that there are people who think as I do, who have thought as I do, who will think as I do. There those who will live, unconscious of me, but continuing my attitude, so to speak, as I continue, unknowingly, the similar attitude of those before me. I could write and write. All it takes is a motion of the hand in response to a brain impulse, trained from childhood to record in our own American brand of hieroglyphics the translations of external stimuli. How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person? --- That I have banged into and assimilated various things? That my environment and a chance combination of genes for me where I am?” (p.47)
“There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds: …” (p. 54)
“...I am part man, and I notice women’s breasts and thighs with the calculation of a man choosing a mistress… but that is the artist and the analytical attitude toward the female body… for I am more a woman; even as I long for full breasts and a beautiful body, so do I abhor the sensuousness which they bring…. I desire the things which will destroy me in the end…” (p.55)
“... and I am caught in musing -- how life is a swift motion, a continuous flowing, changing, and how one is always saying goodbye and going places, seeing people, doing things. Only in the rain and sometimes, only when the rain comes, closing in your pitifully small radius of activity, only when you sit and listen by the window as the cold we air blow thinly by the back of your neck - only then do you think and feel sick.” (p.63)
“Lying on my stomach on the flat warm rock, I let my arm hang over the side, and my hand caressed the rounded contours of the sun-hot stone, and felt the smooth undulations of it. Such a heat the rock had, suck a rugged and comfortable warmth, that I felt it could be a human body. Burning through the material of my bathing suit, the great heat radiated through my body, and my breast ached against the hard flat stone. A wind, salty and moist, blew damply in my hair; through a great glinting mass of it I could see the blue twinkle of the ocean. The sun seeped into every pore, satiating every querulous fiber of me into a great flowing golden peace. Stretching out on the rock, body taut, then relaxed, on the altar, I felt that I was being raped deliciously by the sun, filled full of heat from the impersonal and colossal god of nature. Warm and perverse was the body of my love under me, and the feeling of his carved flesh was like no other- not soft, not malleable, not wet with sweat, but dry, hard, smooth, cleansed, baptised, purified, and dried clean and crisp by the sun. Like seaweed, brittle, sharp, strong smelling - like stone, rounded, curved, oval clean - like wind, pungent salty - like all these was the body of my love. An orgiastic sacrifice on the altar of rock and sun, and I arose shining from the centuries of love, clean and satiated from the consuming fire of his casual and timeless desire.” (p.74)
“But I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue - rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego” (p. 77)
“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; the have my whole circle of action, thought, and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars - to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording - all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, the travel west, to walk freely at night.” (p. 77)
“There comes a time when all your outlets are blocked, as with wax. You sit in your room, feeling the prickling ache in your body which constricts your throat, tightens dangerously in little tear pockets behind your eyes. One word, one gesture, and all that is pent up in you -- festered resentments, gangrenous jealousies, superfluous desires - unfulfilled - all that would burst out of you in angry impotent tears- in embarrassed sobbing and blubbering to no one in particular. No arms will enfold you, no voice will say, “There, There. Sleep and forget.” No, in your new and horrible independence you feel the dangerous premonitory ache, arising from little sleep and taut strung nerves, and a feeling that the cards have been stacked high against you this once, and that they are still being heaped up. An outlet you need, and they are sealed. You live night and day in dark cramped prison you have made for yourself. And so on this day, you feel you will burst, break, if you cannot let the great reservoir seething in you loose, surging through some leak in the dike. So you go down stairs and sit at the piano. All the children are out; the house is quiet. A sounding of sharp chords on the keyboard, and you begin to feel the relief of loosing some of the great weight on your shoulders.” (p.85)
“Since my woman’s world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.” (p.88)
“... vacation - grinding through an icy, mud-grimy January-February-March, and tentatively, unbelievingly, unfolding into another spring, when the damn world makes us think we are young as we ever were and deceives us by pale lucid skies and the sudden opening of little leaves.
"All this is a quick sketch of the scared naked fear and grief that congealed in me when I saw the vivid young living of my days boxed off and numbered in faceless white squares.” (p.93)
“I want to stay awake for the next three days and nights, drawing the threads of my summer cocoon neatly about me and snipping all the ends…” (p. 96)
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