Not That Bad Quotes

“It is more like carrying something really heavy, forever. You do not get to put it down: you have to carry it, and so you carry it the way you need to, however it fits best.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Why Is It So Important to Remember?

When you were abused, those around you acted as if it weren’t happening. Since no one else acknowledged the abuse, you sometimes felt that it wasn’t real. Because of this you felt confused. You couldn’t trust your own experience and perceptions. Moreover, others’ denial led you to suppress your memories, thus further obscuring the issue.

You can end your own denial by remembering. Allowing yourself to remember is a way of confirming in your own mind that you didn’t just imagine it. Because the person who abused you did not acknowledge your pain, you may have also thought that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as you felt it was. In order to acknowledge to yourself that it really was that bad, you need to remember as much detail as possible. Because by denying what happened to you, you are doing to yourself exactly what others have done to you in the past: You are negating and denying yourself.”
― Beverly Engel, The Right to Innocence: Healing the Trauma of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Therapeutic 7-Step Self-Help Program for Men and Women, Including How to Choose a Therapist and Find a Support Group

“Some disabled people spend a significant amount of their energy on trying to come across as abled or as not that disabled.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I survived.

Raped children are supposed to die. What would the culture of the individual white cisgender male straight genius do without us? We are the predicate of their sentences, material for their dispassionate dissections.

We are supposed to die prettily and vacantly so our rage doesn’t tear down all their certificates and awards and case files, trash their analysis and ram their face in the privilege that allows them to side with our abusers in silencing and killing us.

“He has sometimes likened his style of writing to that of a medic performing a post-mortem on a raped child-whose job is to analyze the injuries, not to give vent to the rage that is felt.”
- Susie Mackenzie on J.G. Ballard,
Guardian, Sept. 6th, 2003

If Ballard’s is the model for the experimental, political novel, how is the (un)dead raped child supposed to write, even if she survives?”
― So Mayer, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture