Cristina

“One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdain'd
For thee to disdain it.
One hope too like dispair
For prudence to smother,

I can give not what men call love:
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And heaven rejects not:
The desire of the moth for the star,
The devotion of something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Trauma isn’t just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That’s just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had. The childhood other kids around you had. The fact that you could have had a mom who hugged and kissed you when you skinned your knee. Or a dad who stayed and brought you a bouquet of flowers at your graduation. Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself. You have to stand in your kitchen, starving, near tears, next to a burnt chicken, and you can’t call your mom to tell her about it, to listen to her tell you that it’s okay, to ask if you can come over for some of her cooking. Instead, you have to pull up your bootstraps and solve the painful puzzle of your life by yourself. What other choice do you have? Nobody else is going to solve it for you.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number-
Shake your chains to earth like
dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many-they are few.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy: Written on Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester

“for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly;”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden