Noreen Masud > Quotes

“And I won't want to stop feeling the way I do. I don't want to give up knowing, in this very visceral way, what I know about people and what they can do to you. About countries and what they can do to you. I don't want ever to be wholly relaxed, wholly at home, in a world of flowing fresh water built on the parched pain of others. The world itches, and so it should.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“My life only has two layers. On the top is thick joy, moving around like the sea, full of fish and slopping goofily at the edges: active and exuberant and amazed by everything. The bottom layer is the cold sea floor, where insects pick through dead things. I'm in the top layer, and then suddenly I'm tired and I'm back on the floor, my cheek against the whisper that says nothing matters.
There's no space in between.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“But I'd begun, slowly, to understand that complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or cPTSD, was different. It was particularly difficult to treat, because - like a flat landscape - it didn't offer a significant landmark, an event, that you could focus on and work with. Complex post-traumatic stress, according to the psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, is the result of 'prolonged, repeated trauma,' rather than individual traumatic events. It's what happens when you're born into a world, shaped by a world, where there's no safety, ever. When the people who should take care of you are, instead, scary and unreliable, and when you live years and years without the belief that escape is possible.

When you come from a world like this, when all your muscles are trained to tension and suspicion, normal life feels unbearable. It doesn't make sense, getting up, going to class, eating lunch, returning home, sleeping. You don't trust it. It doesn't feel real. And unreality can hurt more than pain.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“We tell stories to make them visible. Or we tell stories so that we don't have to look at them any longer.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“This isn't an inspirational story. This isn't a story about keeping the flame of hope alive through adversity, and burning through to the other side, where what is wished for can at last be had. This is a story, I think, about what happens when in a very real sense that flame of hope is put out entirely. When forever after you can't find the muscle strength, deep in you, to rise to the moment when something wished-for might actually be attained, or even when something might be wished for in the first place.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“Supposedly, trauma transcends language and time, and is therefore untellable. Perhaps sometimes it does, and is. But I think traumatized people do know how to tell their stories. What’s difficult is that people don’t know how to hear them.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“In particular, flat lands provide solace for someone who doesn’t experience conventionally heightened feeling. In a world where exaggerated expressions of emotion are the norm, on social media and in the workplace’s stringent emotional labour demands, the quiet presence of a flat landscape—refusing to rise into anything—gives me permission to be numb, to be without feeling or desire.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“I like bones because they speak to a basic problem of mine: that human beings are at once living, thinking, laughing creatures, and also skeletons covered in dense, marbled meat.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place

“She's the main character. It changed everything for me, but it's not mine. What happened to me didn't happen to *me*. I just lived in its terrible air.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“The flat place is the place of grief, but also the place of the real. It’s real because of that grief: it displays itself starkly, and you are beside yourself in the face of what can’t be denied. But at least you are beside yourself. You have that consolation. You curl your fingers into a fist and pretend you are holding a hand.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“When there is no novelty in your world, you become used to taking a long time to do one thing. Reading and rereading and rereading. But also: spending time with things which do nothing, which give you nothing. There is something which emerges in the space between you and the obdurate object. There is something which happens when you attention is not attracted, steered, managed; when you open yourself to something already fully exposed, with nothing more to know.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“Children are always ghosts to adults, no matter what they do; they're always shadows of our own fears and memories and rages. No adult can ever see a child properly, through that veil. We've got no idea what they are. We have to just guess, and we can only guess based on what we already know. And we'll always get it wrong.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“The flat place is what happens when one’s reality is at odds with that of everyone else. When one’s truth comes starkly into contact with a world which denies it. Which cannot see it.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“Complex PTSD is different from PTSD. It doesn't turn on a single, traumatic event that happened to you. A *single* event. An even that *happened* to you. An even that happened to *you*. It's a story you can't claim as yours. It's the hole in your head.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“War and whiteness organize the world. They tell you what you can imagine and what you can’t: what stories you can revel in and what stories get burnt up into feathers of ash and taken away by the wind. Only the war stories of white people seem to matter. They offer a line through: a beginning and an end.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“Your body knows you're feeling sad, even if you don't.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“Some things stay unresolved. You make peace with their active, living presence in your life. You live in, and with, the charged absence.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“Britain’s comfortable indulgences - its infrastructure, its economy, its food supplies - depend on modern slavery, its wealth and resources on thousands of brown and Black bodies murdered during empire. Britain lives in terrible denial, I know now, of a history it can’t admit to. And it survives that denial by indicating to people of colour, very subtly, very passively, that they shouldn’t think of themselves as real. Because if no one real was hurt, then no real harm has been done.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“Without brutal human intervention, these landscapes I was walking through - heart thudding, breath catching - would never have existed. Perhaps it was odd of me, even perverse, to love a beauty predicated on destruction, thousands of animal and plant species wiped out by the wealthy and powerful.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“When there is a truth which affirms itself insistently in a way that has no end and no resolution, when it receives no responsiveness or recognition, and has nowhere to site itself but in itself, entrenched in its own starkness - that's the flat place.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“To accept that not all discoveries involve digging for answers, or ascending heights - that sometimes it’s just a case of staying quietly and steadily, with what you already know, and have always known.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“I felt powerfully myself. That self was awkward, badly assembled like a marionette, singed around the edges, solitary and hostile. And there was room for me, in that moment, to be all of those things, without apology.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“Most flat landscapes disappear. The water retakes them. Houses accrete upwards over their surfaces. They're ploughed, claimed, conquered, cemented. No one bothers to guard a space which they don't really see, a dead space, a staging ground for their own projects and priorities. Land is at a premium everywhere, especially the flat land which no one loves but everyone wants to use. So it's a particular privilege to be able to come back to a flat place, years after the first visit, and find it still there.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“I shuffled angrily, thinking about who expected the world to accommodate them and who didn't; who could be sure of a rescue team sent out to them in this world, and who got swallowed up by it and taken away.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“But Britain, where I've lived for seventeen years, feels unreal too. I can't quite trust in the clean water that flows from the tap; the full supermarket shelves, the orderly parks and gardens. I feel as though it's built on a lie, on hidden or delegated suffering. As though I'm in a luxurious cinema watching a film, in a city where war is raging, and over the music of the opening credits I can hear, faintly, the screams and explosions filtering through, into the cosy velvet auditorium. And there's enough truth in this, historically, to prevent me from dismissing it as mere trauma response on my part. Britain's comfortable indulgences - its infrastructure, its food supplies - depend on modern slavery, its wealth and resources on thousands of brown and Black bodies murdered during empire. Britain lives in terrible denial, I know now, of a history it can't admit to. And it survives that denial by indicating to people of colour, very subtly, very passively, that they shouldn't think of themselves as real. Because if no one real was hurt, then no real harm has been done.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“Above all, I had the image of someone putting their hands on my stomach. My stomach which cramped, kicked, dissolved, swelled; which held everything in my life that I didn’t understand; which tried to do everything to break away from me. If someone put their hands on my stomach, I thought, I would be able to feel its outlines at last; I’d know where it began and ended.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“Supposedly trauma transcends language and time, and is therefore untellable. Perhaps sometimes it does and is. But I think traumatized people do know how to tell their stories. What’s difficult is that people don’t know how to hear them.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“In the fenlands, the celestial, the mythical, seemed to lie cheek to cheek with the earthen everyday world.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“When I tell this story, I don't know how to put the emphases in the right places; how to make it matter in the right ways, or not matter in the wrong ways. I tell it flatly, because I don't know how else to tell it. And no one knows what to say. And then I stop... It is impossible to narrate this story in any way that makes it matter. If I offered it to you, you'd stare and stare, unsure what you were meant to be looking at.
Supposedly, trauma transcends language and time, and is therefore untellable. Perhaps sometimes it does, and is. But I think traumatized people do know how to tell their stories. What's difficult is that people don't know how to hear them.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“I’d never understood direction, never been able to give directions, even, mortifyingly, to my own home. That part of my brain was warped and foetal, and would never get any bigger, because I hadn’t been able to stretch it as a child. Nice girls don’t walk in the street where men can see them.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma