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You can’t force solitude onto a soul that needs to fly,
p. 14 #Quotable
It’s a funny thing, coming home. Everything smells the same, looks the same, feels the same, but you are different; the contrast between who you were when you left and who you are heightened against the backdrop of old haunts.
Note: Reminds me of coming home from treatment and such p. 42 #Familiar
legendary Tunisian singer Ali Riahi
p. 42 #Music // Book
I understood now why sI many writers and artists, while in the thick of illness, became memoirists. It provided a sense of control, a way to reshape your circumstances on your own terms, in your own words. “That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is, ” Jeanette Winterson wrote. “It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”
p. 107 #Art // Writing
As Kahlo wrote, “Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”
Note:  p. 109 #Art // Writing, #Quotable
We were both forging unlikely careers: Melissa painted self-portraits from bed; I wrote self-portraits from bed. Watercolors and words were the drugs we preferred for our pain. We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art.
p. 157 #Art // Writing
Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath for breath.
p. 190 #Familiar
I hadn’t noticed the fine print until now: When you survive something that was thought to be unsurvivable, the obvious is gained. You have your life— you have time. But it’s only when you get there that you realize your survival has come at a cost.
p. 193 #Familiar
“EVERYONE WHO IS born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
p. 199 #Familiar, #Quotable
I’m left with the question of how to repatriate myself to the kingdom of the well, and whether I ever fully can. No treatment protocols or discharge instructions can guide this part of my trajectory. The way forward is going to have to be my own.
p. 200 #Familiar, #Quotable
Moving on. a It’s a phrase I obsess over: what it means, what it doesn’t, how to do it for real. It seemed so easy at first, too easy, and it’s starting to dawn on me that moving on is a myth—a lie you sell yourself on when your life has become unendurable. It’s the delusion that you can build a barricade between yourself and your past—that you can ignore your pain, that you can bury your great love with a new relationship, that you are among the lucky few who get to skip over the hard work of grieving and healing and rebuilding—and that all this, when it catches up to you, won’t come for blood.
Note: Gotta face the distress; nothing changes if nothing changes. p. 208 #Familiar
And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.
p. 211 #Familiar, #Quotable
…I force myself to live by a rule: I am not allowed to leave out of fear.
p. 221 #Familiar, #Quotable
But that old Hemingway saw—“the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places”—is only true if you live the possibilities of your newly acquired knowledge.
p. 236 #Familiar, #Quotable
Ned closes his eyes and begins to recite a few lines of a Stanley Kunitz poem called “The Layers.” I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
p. 237 #Music // Book , #Quotable
And that’s what every conversation boiled down to —panic about my health…. Their worry had become a tic they couldn’t help themselves from expressing. They wanted to protect me, but their anxiety could be overwhelming. It hadn’t been a conscious decision, but gradually I’d stopped calling or visiting as much. I let emails and texts go unanswered for days; sometimes I didn’t answer at all. I knew this was hurtful, especially to my mom, who was used to being in daily contact, but I didn’t know what else to do. To quell my own fears, I needed space from theirs.
Note: Last line… p. 252 #Familiar
My fatigue continues to chase me, but instead of fighting it or chastising myself for my slowness, I close my eyes… I am trying not just to accept my body’s limitations for a change, but to savor the breaks I have to take because of them. These little stops end up being some of my favorite moments on the road— shifting me out of my swirling mind and into the present, anchoring me in this strange new body, and in new places where I otherwise would never have gone.
p. 256 #Hope
But over time, my field of vision narrowed to the size of a ward, then a bed. Walled off from the outside, I had no choice but to turn my gaze inward. Once I was finally released, the threat of imminent death behind me, I only collapsed even further into myself. I stopped paying attention. Here at the foot of the falls, I’m reorienting my gaze outward again.
p. 258 #Familiar, #Hope
“Forgiveness is a refusal to armor your own heart—a refusal to live in a constricted heart,” he said, seemingly as much to himself as to me. “Living with that openness means feeling pain. It’s not pretty, but the alternative is feeling nothing at all.”
p. 302 #Quotable
Tomorrow may happen, tomorrow may not… you have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead in what you love…. That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.
Note: Quoted from a woman the author visits p. 311 #Quotable
May I be awake enough to notice when love appears and bold enough to pursue It without knowing where it will lead.
p. 318 #Quotable, #Hope