01c. 1976 ADIn other words, it was a struggle with himself. And the product of that struggle: anger, bitterness, resentment, envy or transformation, aspiration, hope, decency..the product of that struggle is the quality of your life and the nature of your soul.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
02c. 1976 ADWhen you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices outside your head. Very often the voices work to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to hate yourself.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
03c. 1976 ADIf killing yourself is not an option anymore, you have to sink into the darkness instead, and make something out of it.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
04c. 1976 ADI never lie ― I am a blatantly truthful person about almost everything. My addiction (or disease as some call it) always lies. I have had very good relationships, but the addict in me always fucked them up. I fall in love quickly, it's a high that rivals drugs for a while. I am monogamous, but I always cheated with depression before the relationship fell apart. Addicts need best friends, healthy people need healthy relationships.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
05c. 1976 ADIt's as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don't think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It's just that I was me. It was all I had.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
07c. 1976 ADWhen he kisses me, I cry. I explain it's not because I wish he were someone else, it's because it's such a shock to the system to be desired after feeling so completely abandoned.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
08c. 1976 ADWhat people don't understand when you've already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don't want to die. I do not want to die. When you don't have so much control over your own thoughts, over the myriad voices in your head, you don't know where they could go.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
09c. 1976 ADThe sadness ― the general sadness that squats and pees inside my brain ― isn't over. It never will be. I know how best to chase it away, though. It usually works. Sometimes it doesn't. But I pray and say, fuck it, then. I choose this. It chooses me. I choose it back.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
10c. 1976 ADI think I've lost my faith and I can't stop writingbecause I don't know howmuch longer I can hold on.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
11c. 1976 ADThe goal was to get sane, to get whole, to be complete enough to support someone else.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
12c. 1976 ADHe meant everything he said, when he said it. But this is his default. And it won out. Right now you're depressed about one thing. Before you were depressed about everything. These are good times for you.""I'm afraid of loving again. I'm afraid I've lost my faith.""You haven't.""The trapdoor I have in my mind? That can go to those bad places? It's almost gave way again.""You know the ways to keep it nailed shut.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
13c. 1976 ADYou do it how you can do it, so long as it's getting done, you're okay.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
14c. 1976 ADI'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
15c. 1976 ADBut I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
16c. 1976 ADIt is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
17c. 1976 ADThere's a boy whose affection I am determined to hunt down and kill. It used to be material objects I felt I needed to be happy. It would make me feel stable if I had him. If I had someone like him, it would prove that I'm stable, and then I wouldn't have to do the work to get there. I am constantly looking for ways to cede control of my worries to someone, anyone.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
18c. 1976 ADMen and the pursuit of them are strongly intertwined with my mental health. I would say, in my defensive defense, that the problem with being a serial monogamist is, there isn't anybody random or unimportant: everybody you sleep with really means something, which is to say each of them is on your public record. At some point I wake up thinking, Fuck this! I don't want another man in my bed ever again. What I really want is a cat.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
19c. 1976 ADIn hindsight, I have no idea why he was ever with me. He thought highly of my breasts. And . . . that's it, I think.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
20c. 1976 ADTime heals all wounds. And if it doesn't, you name them something other than wounds and agree to let them stay.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
21c. 1976 ADNo one ever loved you like him. And no one ever took it away so completely. But it's here. Look around.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
22c. 1976 ADThere is a blessing in losing the one we love. It's the blessing of self-transformation. You don't have to who you were anymore. You've struggled. And now you can change. It doesn't mean that bits of that person won't cling to you, they will throughout your life, but they are now subsumed into something greater. That person has given you, in fact, the most important blessing, which is they gave you the blessing of transforming your soul into something better, something more beautiful.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
23c. 1976 ADOf course he freaked me out. Of course it's nothing to do with me. But none of that matters. He loved me and now he doesn't. I was everything to him and now I am nothing.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
24c. 1976 ADI say, "Well then I don't know if it was real, and that makes me feel like I'm going insane again.""Absolutely it was real. It was a real, partial picture. Because it ended preemptively, things you would have learned about him in the relationship, you are instead learning in the breakup. You have learned that he has a desperate desire for intimacy and then a desperate desire for the cave. He will get lonely there eventually and come back.""To me?"He doesn't pause. "To someone new.""And I'll have to watch another girl?""You will have to, but you will also know what lies ahead for that poor girl.Emma Forrest / quote ↗
