Mandi

“And so you aren’t just mad, or heartbroken: you grieve from the betrayal”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Later, you will you learn that a common feature of domestic abuse is “dislocation.” That is to say, the victim has just moved somewhere new, or she’s somewhere where she doesn’t speak the language, or has been otherwise uprooted from her support network, her friends or family, her ability to communicate. She is made vulnerable by her circumstance, her isolation. Her only ally is her abuser, which is to say she has no ally at all. And so she has to struggle against an unchangeable landscape that has been hammered into existence by nothing less than time itself; a house that is too big to dismantle by hand; a situation too complex and overwhelming to master on her own.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Because there is no love you can throw on them, no hug big enough that will change the power of that drug; it is just beyond imagination how controlling and destructive it is.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“The latest research on substance use disorder from Harvard Medical School shows it takes the typical opioid-addicted user eight years—and four to five treatment attempts—to achieve remission for just a single year. And yet only about 10 percent of the addicted population manages to get access to care and treatment for a disease that has roughly the same incidence rate as diabetes.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America