What My Bones Know: A Memoir Of Healing From Complex Trauma Quotes
"I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression since I was twelve years old. The pain is a fanged beast that I’ve battled a hundred times throughout the years."
"The first thing I do after our Skype window closes is bring up Google. I’ve never heard of complex PTSD."
"I hadn’t understood how far the disease had spread. How complete its takeover of my identity was."
"My trauma is literally pumping through my blood, driving every decision in my brain."
"The first night my father told me I was just like my mother, he uncorked a lifetime of rage."
"Hatred, I learned quickly, was the antidote to sadness. It was the only safe feeling."
"I knew all the good things from the night before, moments of dancing with old friends, sharing intimate confessions with new ones."
"The dread arose when I was editing a tricky radio story, or I said something irritating at a party."
"I thrust my face underneath the surface to try to name the source of this dread but surfaced only with the usual guesses: I must be lazy or I’m making mistakes in my career or I’m spending too much money or I’m a bad friend."
"Always, always: I tried to be good. But when the dread was at its most terrible, no matter what I did, I was never good enough."
"Because the dread told me that I was on the precipice of fucking everything up."
"In order to quell these disturbing prophecies, I asked for affirmation over and over, fishing for compliments every time I looked in the mirror."
"I sometimes worked with tears running down my cheeks, blurring the computer screen."
"I went to work on Christmas and on New Year’s Day."
"I wrung my body out like a towel, twisting both ends with red fists and sinking my teeth into it, gritting out, 'It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine,'"
"I pitched stories, helped design shows, reported and narrated stories, edited others’ work, and did a lot of sound design."
"You can’t hear that? I thought you were supposed to be good at mixing?"
"I leaned my cheek against the cold taxi window on the way home, turning up my headphones to keep me awake: Started from the bottom, now we’re here."
"You don’t have to fix anything to deserve love."
"Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed."
"Can we take a ride? Get out of this place while we still have time?"
"I must be loved tremendously. I must be magic."
"Can a mentally ill woman ever be trusted with her own story?"
"You have to not just do…you have to be someone they want to be around."
"If you really loved someone, it would emanate from you, sincere and overflowing, generous and unconditional."
"It’s very brave. But change is hard. It’s possible. It just takes practice."
"It’s not okay that this is happening to you, sweetheart."
"It's like faulting a mountain lion for mauling a man; how can you blame its nature, a consequence of its programming?"
"You have to talk to them nicely…you actually have to _say…_out loud!…how much you care about them."
"Histories of suffering should not be allocated exclusively to their victims."
"I am the trauma you bury away. I am the lie you hold under your tongue."
"Complex post-traumatic stress disorder is a disorder caused by lack of nurture."
"Estrangement is not freeing. It has not felt joyful. It has not been happy. It has only felt necessary."
"You made a cruel kid. Come look what you did."
"Trauma isn’t just the sadness that comes from being beaten or neglected. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had."
"The essence of what trauma does to a person is it makes them feel like they don’t deserve love."
"Relationships are like sports. It’s muscle memory, all the action of doing."
"Love is not a finite resource, something you have to mete out carefully like a package of Oreos. Instead, providing love begets more love, which begets more and more love."
"I’ve learned that the beast of C-PTSD is a wily shape-shifter. Just when I believe I can see the ghoul for exactly what it is, it dissipates like a puff of smoke."
"I wasn’t loved in spite of my C-PTSD—but, in part, because of it."
"I accept the lifelong battle and its limitations now. Even though I must always carry the weight of grief on my back, I have become strong."
"These negative emotions are not simply something to endure and erase. They are purposeful. Beneficial. They tell us what we need."
"Healing is never final. It is never perfection. But along with the losses are the triumphs."
"I wasn’t freaking out because I was made for this moment."
"So this is healing, then, the opposite of the ambiguous dread: fullness."
"The fact that we were able to create a moment like this together makes me know I picked the right partner to share this life with."
"Every time the beast returns, I have to fight it slightly differently. The wars are shorter now, and often, the old tools work well."