Caroline Kettlewell > Quotes

“You might imagine that a person would resort to self-mutilation only under extremes of duress, but once I'd crossed that line the first time, taken that fateful step off the precipice, then almost any reason was a good enough reason, almost any provocation was provocation enough. Cutting was my all-purpose solution.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“That's when I wanted to cut. I cut to quiet the cacophony. I cut to end this abstracted agony, to reel my selves back to one present and physical whole, whose blood was the proof of her tangibility.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“Anorexia isn't about being fat, it's about having fat.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“For some reason, I believed that I had above all else an obligation to protect everyone-- my teachers, my family-- from the knowledge of my cutting. What they did not know would not cause them pain.”
― Caroline Kettlewell

“I needed cutting now the way a diabetic needs insulin. It was a bulwark, steady and unyielding, I could throw up against the insidious, corrosive lapping of a whispering sea of uneasiness.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“Well how many troubles should equal a legitimate reason for self-mutilation? Ten? Twenty? One hundred? And how monumental must these troubles be? There’s probably no critical mass beyond which cutting yourself would ever seem to most people like a reasonable choice. I cut because it did look that way to me. I cut because something had to give. I cut because the alternatives were worse.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“Once you take to the habit of deception, every new lie comes that much easier. Though to me it wasn't so much lies as a matter of judicious editing. We all inevitably present a version of ourselves that is a collection of half-truths and exclusions. The way I saw it, the truth was too complicated, whereas the well-chosen lie would put everyone's mind at ease.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“The chaos in my head spun itself into a silk of silence. I had distilled myself to the immediacy of hand, blade, blood, flesh.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“Somehow however just knowing that I could fully expect unhappiness to return – if not predictably then nevertheless reliably – was strangely liberating. The point was that even chaos had a structure a beginning and eventually an end. It was possible to live through it. I’d been doing as much for twenty years.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“I have drawn the line, and I am still on this side of it.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“Why can't I remember our family Christmas, or a warm spring day, or anything that might have been pleasant? It is as though the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out everything but the darkest colors of the spectrum.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“My unhappiness precluded all else; unhappiness is a kind of narcissism, in which nothing that does not resonate with your unhappiness can interest you.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“In the end, if we could ever really pursue the question 'why' to its true headwaters, we might find it is often no more than this: a beginning so trifling that it hardly bears notice. The flip of a switch. The flash of a neurotransmission. Maybe there was always something amiss, like a bulb planted and forgotten that blooms when the season is right.
...A thousand girls could have gotten through my seventh grade and breezed on with a laugh; I didn't.”
― Caroline Kettlewell

“How gratifying it is to amuse. How easy it gets to toss off a witticism to ease any awkwardness, to sidestep any solemnity. When you amuse, it even seems, for the briefest possible moment that you are who you appear to be, so clever and confident and at ease.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“I found it paralyzingly difficult to make even the simplest decisions. So much hung in the balance, so many complicated parameters needed to be taken into consideration, yet always there was too little information, no way to know what outcomes could result. Life was a terrifying, invisible web of consequences. What mayhem might I unknowingly wreak by saying yes when I could have said no, by going east instead of west?”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“I wanted to cut for the cut itself, for the delicate severing of capillaries, the transgression of veins. I needed to cut the way your lungs scream for air when you swim the length of the pool underwater in one breath. It was a craving so organic it seemed to have arisen from my skin itself. Imagining the sticky-slick scarlet trails of my own blood soothed me. This”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game: A Cutter's Memoir

“If a heart could fail in its pumping, a lung in its breathing, then why not a brain in its thinking, rendering the world forever askew, like a television with bad reception? And couldn't a brain fail as arbitrarily as any one of these other parts, without regard to the blessing and cosseting that, everyone was so eager to remind you, disentitled you from unhappiness?”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“It didn’t occur to me that there was something decidedly odd in finding a box of razor blades aesthetically appealing. I wonder if a heroin addict loves the elegant simplicity of the needle, if a drinker romances the curve and shape of the bottle.”
― Caroline Kettlewell

“Memory is faithless, like a cheating lover, telling you what you believe is true.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“could get up and get through the day and eat my dinner and complete my homework, because that’s what you do. It was what was expected of me. It was what I expected of me. I could never have failed that duty, even when I wanted to. I would not have ventured the temerity to believe that my troubles justified a failure to meet my obligations. Those obligations drove me like a bus I couldn’t get”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game: A Cutter's Memoir