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Trauma Quotes


"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."


"His abusemakes her an anvilwithout spark."


"Struggling transforms her captor into a Chinese finger trap. She's suffocating. Sucking in air without relief. Her lungs expand. Contract. Expand. They fill with lies and broken promises. With despair and lost hope. Each inhale is empty. Invisible hands reach into her body and constrict around her windpipe. She watches her friends collapse like supernovae, their cognizance disappearing into a black hole. A black hole she's quickly cascading into. The dark consumes, bleeds into her vision. She blinks. Catches icy blue eyes peeking out from the shadows."


"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."


"One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me."


"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."


"My traumatic experience was life changing."


"The old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy ... a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of 'solving Amy'. When I'd hold up the bloody stumps, she'd sigh and turn to her secret mental notebooks on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings."
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