Mandi Brown

“She was fighting a disease of despair not of her own making. She didn’t ask for her circumstances. But she was doing everything in her power to overcome them. Sometimes we don’t make it. But that’s not the important part. What’s important is how hard we try.”
― T.J. Brearton, Her Perfect Secret

“Love, you will never lose me to the wind. You are the lightning that made me fill my chest with candles. You are the thunder clapping for the poem nobody else wants to hear. You are an icicle’s tear watering a tulip on the first day of spring. You melt me alive. You kiss me deep as my roots will reach, and I want nothing more than”
― Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

“We are, all of us, exceedingly complex creatures and do ourselves a service in regarding ourselves as complex. Otherwise, we live in a dream world of nonexistent, simplistic black-and-white notions which simply do not apply to human life. There are none of us who are all good, all bad, all wise, all stupid or all anything at all. We are vast combinations of every kind of characteristic possible . . . and the world we affect is full of subtle and blatant incongruities and complex shadings, too. – Theodore Rubin”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“In the mental health field, suicide is part of the diseases of despair. Alcoholism, drug addiction, suicidal ideation. It’s a physical health condition. We don’t ‘commit’ a heart attack. Saying it associates blame, like committing a crime or a sin. The stigma can deter people from coming forward who are contemplating suicide. And also, a person may attempt a suicide, but they may not complete it.”
― T.J. Brearton, Her Perfect Secret