Sanam

“Here is another truth about wintering: you’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once it’s over, it’s your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it’s our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out. This may involve the breaking of a lifelong habit, one passed down carefully through generations: that of looking at other people’s misfortunes and feeling certain that they brought them upon themselves in a way that you never would. This isn’t just an unkind attitude. It does us harm, because it keeps us from learning that disasters do indeed happen and how we can adapt when they do. It stops us from reaching out to those who are suffering. And when our own disaster comes, it forces us into a humiliated retreat, as we try to hunt down mistakes that we never made in the first place or wrongheaded attitudes that we never held. Either that, or we become certain that there must be someone out there we can blame. Watching winter and really listening to its messages, we learn that effect is often disproportionate to cause; that tiny mistakes can lead to huge disasters; that life is often bloody unfair, but it carries on happening with or without our consent. We learn to look more kindly on other people’s crises, because they are so often portents of our own future.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“What they were really saying is, victims can’t write. Victims aren’t smart, capable, or independent. They need external help to articulate their thoughts, needs, and demands. They are too emotional to compose anything coherent. It cannot be the same drunk girl who was found unconscious, the one who the media said uncontrollably sobbed throughout testimony. On a deep level, they wanted to take away my writing, which I would not give up so easily.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir

“What do you like? I said, I like drawing. What are you going to do? I will draw, I will speak. You are worth more than three months. I am not a burden. I am not limited, I am ever expanding. Your suffering means something. You are worth more than three months. They could never truly have rejected me since they had never fully known me. You are worth more than three months. The assault was never all of me. I could feel myself fighting, driving the pen into the page. You are worth more than three months.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir

“My writing is sophisticated because I had a head start, because I am years in the making, because I am my mother and her mother before. When I write, I have the privilege of using a language that she fought her whole life to understand. When I speak in opposition, I am grateful my voice is uncensored. I do not take my freedom of speech, my abundance of books, my access to education, my ease of first language for granted. My mom is a writer. The difference is, she spent the first twenty years of her life surviving. I am a writer, who spent twenty years of my life fed and loved in a home and a classroom.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name