Alexandra

“sometimes i wish i could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead. sometimes i wish there were a way to let people know that just because i live in a world without rules, and in a life that is lawless, doesn’t mean that it won’t hurt so bad the morning after. sometimes i think that i was forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest i could throw in the face of a world that said it was all right for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left. certainly deceit and treachery in both romantic and political relationships is nothing new, but at one time, it was bad, callous, and cold to hurt somebody. now it’s just the way things go, part of the growth process.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“But unfortunately, I do not have one foundational trauma. I have thousands. So my anxious freak-outs are not, as the books say, "temporal." They don't only occur when I see an angry face or someone pulls a driver out of their golf bag. My freak-outs are more or less constant, a fixed state of being. That infinite plethora of triggers makes complex PTSD more difficult to heal from than traditional PTSD. And the way the books seem to think about it, our fixed state of being also makes us more problematic.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know

“people with C-PTSD can often assume problems are about them—not out of selfishness or narcissism but because they want to have enough control to be able to solve the problem.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“I think the closeness that you’re able to experience when you’re with Rafe is something you’ve been deprived of and something you’ve needed for so long that it’s causing you to go to these extremes of emotion every time you feel him slipping away,”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America