Stacy Pershall > Quotes

“[Eating disorders] are a wonderful tool for helping you reject others before they can reject you. Example: You're at a party. The popular girls are there. You know you can never be as cool as they are, but when one of the pops a potato chip into her mouth or chooses real Coke over Diet, for that moment you are better”
― Stacy Pershall

“Nobody would commit suicide if the pain of being inside herself, the agony of the sleepless, tortured hours spent watching the world get smaller and uglier, were bearable or could be relieved by other people telling her how they wanted her to feel. A depressed person is selfish because her self, the very core of who she is, will not leave her alone, and she can no more stop thinking about this self and how to escape it than a prisoner held captive by a sadistic serial killer can forget about the person who comes in to torture her everyday. Her body is brutalized by her mind. It hurts to breathe, eat, walk, think. The gross maneuverings of her limbs are so overwhelming, so wearying, that the fine muscle movements or quickness of wit necessary to write, to actually say something, are completely out of the question.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“Cincinatti was where I learned that running away from your problems has a three-month statute of limitations, a lesson I have found repeatedly to be true. Three months is still a first impression -- of a city, of other people, of yourself in that place. But there comes a point when you can no longer hide who you are, and the reactions of others become all too familiar...”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“A depressed person is selfish because her self, the very core of who she is, will not leave her alone, and she can no more stop thinking about this self and how to escape it than a prisoner held captive by a sadistic serial killer can forget about the person who comes in to torture her everyday. Her body is brutalized by her mind.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“The singing stopped when I walked in. They all turned and stared at me, Bonne-Bell-Orange-Crush-glossed mouths hanging open, looking at me with the same horror and excitement they'd exhibit it I had just walked into the room naked. I stood there frozen, hyperaware of my scruffiness, my shirt untucked and one ponytail higher than the other. The Bad Dog turned me in on myself like a vortex, gleefully saying, Look, look. There they are, here you are. Separate. You do not belong.”
― Stacy Pershall

“To anyone who thinks eating disorders are something rich, bored white girls do to get attention, I bid you bite me. I have frequent, intense, inappropriate outbursts of anger over the lies little girls are told about what is beautiful.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“Borderline means you’re one of those girls…

…who walk around wearing long sleeves in the summer because you’ve carved up your forearms over your boyfriend. You make pathetic suicidal gestures and write bad poetry about them, listen to Ani DiFranco albums on endless repeat, end up in the emergency room for overdoses, scare off boyfriends by insisting they tell you that they love you five hundred times a day and hacking into their email to make sure they’re not lying, have a police record for shoplifting, and your tooth enamel is eroded from purging. You’ve had five addresses and eight jobs in three years, your friends are avoiding your phone calls, you’re questioning your sexuality, and the credit card companies are after you. It took a lot of years to admit that I was exactly that girl, and that the diagnostic criteria for the disorder were essentially an outline of my life.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“One thing that pisses me off royally is hearing drug companies denounced as the devil. I don't like giant corporations (or, in the words of Spalding Gray, "the big indifferent machine") any more than anyone else, but I really don't like wanting to kill myself. A person who denounces psychopharmaceuticals based on a political agenda is a person who has never lain crumpled in a ball in the closet, sobbing uncontrollably, face covered in Sharpie, throat raw from induced vomiting. Accordingly, that person should be thankful and shut the hell up.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“Not all deviance is negative; without it, we'd never change the world.”
― Stacy Pershall

“One of the things I’ve read about borderlines is that we alternate between a sense of entitlement and the belief that we’re lower than the dirt under people’s shoes.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“The tattoo artist inflicts pain and I take it. With each breath I count to one again. Each inhale, each exhale, time passes in the smallest of pieces, and pieces still smaller than those.

This is how you count a life. This is how you go through it. Each second of hurt is a second that's already passed, one you never have to go through again. I have counted in pieces that small, when walking from the bed to the fridge seemed an insurmountable goal. I have counted my breaths, my steps, my eye-blinks, my hiccups, the tiny pulse in my thumb. And when I started getting tattooed, two of the things I used to need were gone: to write on myself, and to find irrelevant things to count. A second of intense pain is the most profound thing you can live through. And another, and another, and another, and then you know what it is to feel, and to struggle through that feeling one small agonizing increment at a time, and if you know that, you know what it is to live with mental illness.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“I believed by age eleven that I was horribly ugly and undeserving of human companionship.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“A second of intense pain is the most profound thing you can live through. And another, and another, and another, and then you know what it is to feel, and to struggle through that feeling one small agonizing increment at a time, and if you know that, you know what it is to live with mental illness.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“This is why I feel frustrated now when I hear people referring to suicide as a self-centered act: of course it is. Nobody would commit suicide if the pain of being inside her self, the agony of the sleepless, tortured hours spent watching the world get smaller and uglier, were bearable or could be relieved by other people telling her how they wanted her to feel. A depressed person is selfish because her self, the very core of who she is, will not leave her alone, and she can no more stop thinking about this self and how to escape it than a prisoner held captive by a sadistic serial killer can forget about the person who comes in to torture her every day. Her body is brutalized by her mind. It hurts to breathe, sleep, eat, walk, think. The gross maneuverings of her limbs are so overwhelming, so wearying, that the fine muscle movements or quickness of wit necessary to write, to actually say something, are completely out of the question.”
― Stacy Pershall

“The loss of love negates everything good about us. Never mind that everyone else in the world has gone through at least one bad breakup; ours—our current one, never any of the ones before—is the worst. Nobody else has ever experienced such pain, and the only relief from that pain is punishment, swift and severe. So we cut, or burn, or starve, or purge, or write all over ourselves with Sharpies, or imprison ourselves in basements.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“A person who denounces psychopharmaceuticals based on a political agenda is a person who has never lain crumpled in a ball in the closet, sobbing uncontrollably, face covered in Sharpie, throat raw from induced vomiting. Accordingly, that person should be thankful and shut the hell up.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“Because what is a tattoo, really, but suffering that brings with it beauty?”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“suffering that brings with it beauty?”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“I buried my face in his couch and I realized, for the first time but certainly not the last, that apologizing could be a weapon. You can apologize until people think you’re crazy. Your whole body can become an apology. You’re not skinny enough or smart enough or pretty enough or talented enough or sexy enough or popular enough or sophisticated enough or tall enough or short enough or blond enough or like the last girl enough and you’re sorry, you’re sorry, you’re sorry.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“Harm’s way' was one of Phil’s favorite expressions—he often told me it was where I needed to put myself, to teach myself that I could do it in a controlled manner and survive.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl