“And you know the darkness beyond despair, just as intimately as you know the soaring heights. Because in this and all universes, there is balance. You can t have the one without facing the other. And sometimes you think you can take it because the joy is worth the despair, and sometimes you know you can t take it and how did you ever think you could? And there is the dance; strength and weakness, confidence and desolation.”
“It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say This foolishness ) any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true but just put on, I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would have been easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I m guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days. Three weeks later Sybil reaffirmed her belief in the existence of her other selves in a letter to Miss Updyke, the school nurse of undergraduate days.”
“This is what happens to the brain of those living with mental illnesses (more accurately, brain illnesses ). The brain does not function as it should; life is out of control. The brain alters our bodies; thoughts are distorted, emotions are unregulated, and behaviors we once thought could never occur happen. One of the most challenging, exhausting, and painful phenomena we do as humans is to live and survive with these changes in our minds. The toll it takes on an individual s body and the people in their lives is, tragically, often too much to bear. -Dr. Daniel J. Reidenberg”
“Suddenly, I’m lighter, only half of who I was.”
“The west coast is a mecca for wild hearts, wild minds, wild spirits and I’m a WMD—I’ve got so much energy I’m about to explode.”
“My mind feels like a race car on the track, getting faster and faster every time I pause to think or blink or try to focus on anything. Nothing can keep up to it, not the other cars, not my body, not anyone else in the bar. It’s a rush, pure exhilaration, and I’m having the time of my life. But instead of driving, I’m in the passenger seat, along for the ride, watching myself race around the track from my barstool.”
“As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashbacks can be itself re-traumatizing; if not life-threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivor, for example, survivors of Vietnam.”
“When had I stopped being a person with Paranoid Schizophrenia, and become a Paranoid Schizophrenic; defined by my illness?”
“Self-stigma refers to the state in which a person with mental illness has come to internalize the negative attitudes about mental illness and turns them against him- or herself.”
“Solomon had good days and he had bad days, but the good had far outnumbered the bad since Lisa and Clark had started coming around. Sometimes, though, they d show up and he s look completely exhausted, drained of all his charm and moving in slow motion. They could do that to him—the attacks. Something about the physical response to panic can drain all the energy out of a person, and it doesn t matter what causes it or how long it lasts. What Solomon had was unforgiving and sneaky and as smart as any other illness. It was like a virus or cancer that would hide just long enough to fool him into thinking it was gone. And because it showed up when it damn well pleased, he d learned to be honest about it, knowing that embarrassment only made it worse.”
“I ve learned to be comforted in the dark spot of my mind.”
“She had spells of manic loquaciousness, followed by days of silence.”
“Interestingly, the patients who presented to me self-diagnosed [with Dissociative Identity Disorder] had tried to tell previous therapists of their plight, but had been disbelieved. These therapists had used fallacious capricious criteria (KIuft, 1988) to discredit the diagnosis; e.g., that the patient could not possibly have MPD because she was aware of the other alters [sic!].”
“What I failed to see was that, by ending my life, I would cause interminable pain to my family and friends. I could not understand the heartbreak it would cause those around me. Nor did I consider that my brother, Joseph, might live the rest of his life in continual rage, or that my sister, Libby, might shut herself off from the world and fall into perpetual depression, silence, and sadness mistakenly blaming themselves for my death as many family members do when they lose someone they love to suicide. I certainly held no understanding of the enormous pain my mother and father would suffer because they lost their oldest son in such a terrifying and devastating way. They would not have a chance to watch me mature, marry, and perhaps have children. Instead, all of their hopes, aspirations, and dreams for me would be destroyed with my decision to end my life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“It is not the darkness of shadows: one that follows you, haunts you, terrifies you. Instead, it consumes you, becomes you, weighs you down. It IS you. It is comforting. Familiar. I have walked with it. Eaten with it. Loved with it. Smiled with it. Yet I feel it destroying me. Like cancer. But I can’t remove it. It stays inside of me, taunting me to kill it, myself, but it does not realize that this seduction keeps me alive.”
“My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother s illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to pursue my grandmother no matter where she went on the face of the globe, whispering to her in the foulest terms of her crimes and the blackness of her soul. There was a voice like that in everyone s head, he figured; in my grandmother s case it was just a matter of degree. You could almost see the Skinless Horse as a clever adapation, a strategy for survival evolved by a proven survivor. If you kept the voice inside your head, the way most people did, there could really be only one way to silence it. He admired the defiance, the refusal to surrender, involuntary but implicit in the act of moving that reproachful whisperer to a shadowy corner of a room, an iron furnace in a cellar, the branches of a grand old tree.”
“Who am I fooling? Bad dreams never end. We just pretend they aren’t there.”