Elaine

“We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.”
― Leonora Carrington

“I often feel like nobody," Skip says. "I ask myself: Why would you want to talk to me? Why would anyone want to talk to me? It comes on me suddenly, this feeling that I'm not anything...a person who has spent a lot of time in bed, who doesn't want to be anything."

I know what he is talking about, and this time, I tell him that. For years, I could not understand why anyone took me seriously. I could not understand how I managed to get into MIT or Harvard, why anyone would offer me a postdoctoral fellowship or a job. I could not understand why people kept turning to me after September 11. I didn't see myself as a person who couldn't get out of bed, but as a salesgirl in a coffee shop - the job I had as a teenager who was afraid to apply to college. My identity was stuck there for year.

"Inside me there is the person who wants to be dead," he says. "I can't advocate for myself. I can advocate very strongly for others, but not for myself...Sometimes I'm not sure that I exist. Is this really me - this person whom people want to consult about clergy sexual abuse? Or am I really the person who can't get out of bed? I've gotten better - I spend more of my time living in the present. But it takes a lot of effort to stay in the present - a lot of yoga and meditation.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what i was waiting for.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.”
― Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums