Andrea McDowell

“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

“It isn’t just racism. Being part of an oppressed minority group—being queer or disabled, for example—can cause C-PTSD if you are made to feel unsafe because of your identity. Poverty can be a contributing factor to C-PTSD. These factors traumatize people and cause brain changes that push them toward anxiety and self-loathing. Because of those changes, victims internalize the blame for their failures. They tell themselves they are awkward, lazy, antisocial, or stupid, when what’s really happening is that they live in a discriminatory society where their success is limited by white supremacy and class stratification. The system itself becomes the abuser. When my boss said I was “different,” I thought it meant broken. Now I think it meant something else.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know

“Everything is moving, but there’s so much we can’t see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what’s under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“During a chance meeting, the naturalist E.O. Wilson advised me to give up thinking we are doomed. "It's our chance to practice altruism," he said. I looked doubtful, but he continued. "We have to wear suits of armor like World War II soldiers and just keep going. We have to get used to the changes in the landscape and step over the dead bodies. We have to discipline our behavior and not get stuck in tribal and religious restrictions. We have to work altruistically and cooperatively and make a new world.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is