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Exlpore more Trauma quotes

"His abusemakes her an anvilwithout spark."

"The first several years of my life were used to upload incredible amounts of fear, and I just became afraid of everything. I was afraid of my parents, afraid of my classmates, afraid of the streets of Washington, D.C. I would flinch at every gesture."

"But I don't know what to him about the aftermath of killing a person. About how they never leave you."

"I'd still thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the fear-would fade in time. But that hadn't happened. Instead, the things that I remembered, these little details, seemed to grow stronger, to the point where I could feel their weight in my chest. Nothing, however stuck with me more than the memory of stepping into that dark room and what I found there, and how the light then took that nightmare and made it real."

"It took me years to stop feeling the guilt she made sure I kept feeling about what happened with him. He is a sick person that molests children, but I felt so bad about it for so long. I couldn't talk to a single person about any of this. No one. And she made me feel so bad about it all that I felt I shouldn't talk about it, even if there was someone. I felt ashamed and thought I was an awful person. Sometimes I still do. My mother abandoned me in the worst ways possible."

"Women formed from black smoke come to me at night and they scream for me to not cut their throats or twist those tiny necks. They beg and cry. Then right at the moment when I can't take anymore, I rush up to them, slashing at the smoke with my hands. Do they go away? Never. They turn into familiar faces."
Explore more quotes by Aspen Matis

"Living as Wild Child, I could no longer be Debby Parker comfortably - this name that I'd been given at birth that defined me before I'd had the chance to define myself."

"I walked without breaks, slept through nights without waking, inhumanly smooth " a small machine."

"I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love."

"This was a vision of wildness contained " caged. Huge, powerful animals whose wild dignity was stripped from them.Panic jolted me. These animals had had their freedom seized by people who put their own desires first. In the glint of the silver cage bars I saw the same steely repression, the same cold entitlement that allows people to feel it is okay to steal bodies and lives as I glimpsed while frozen beneath Junior. The boy who had put his few minutes of pleasure before my entire life."

"These tools were my parents' way of saying: What you're doing is important. We support it. We want to help you find your way."

"I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen."

"Death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply bypass and quickly disregard. It was really The End."

"I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament."
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