When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.
All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.
Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.
But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it’s a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.
We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.
It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.
There is, in the end, the letting go.
When you believe that you are not worthwhile in and of yourself, in the back of your mind you also begin to believe that life is not worthwhile in and of itself. It is only worthwhile insofar as it relates to your crusade. It is a kamikaze mission.
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.
For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I’m unable to write.
The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.
You can’t teach an ear, you can’t teach talent, but you can teach people who have those things not to just fly by the seat of their pants.
My students know I have a life, they know I’ve written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would’ve told them anyway!
The biggest fear of my life is living. My second biggest fear is dying.
My parents say that even as a very, very little kid, the way that I acted was dramatically different from other little kids.
I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it’s high maintenance.
I know how this feels: the tightening of the chest, the panic, the what-have-I-done-wait-I-was-kidding. Eating disorders linger so long undetected, eroding the body in silence, and then they strike. The secret is out. You’re dying.
Having a normal person around me made it poingnantly clear to me that I was out of control.
Because I’m not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb – one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I’m coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.
You can only whine for so long. Then you need to get your life back.