Nadav David

“Trauma symptoms themselves can become drivers of cycles of violence. Hyper-vigilance exxagerates survivors' sense of threat-so that a minimal threat can legitimately feel like a substantial and potentially even life-threatening one. How endangered one feels depends in part on the baseline of danger that exists. So for survivors who are hurt in the context of relative safety, their exaggerated sense of danger may result in simple self-protective actions like crossing the street when they get a bad feeling about someone approaching, holding their keys as they approach their apartment, or carrying pepper spray in their bag. For people who live where there is a more widespread, regular threat of violence, where day in and day out, they are making decisions that will affect whether or not they get home safe and alive, perceiving threats as more immediate than they are may mean that the self-protective actions people choose are graver. Not all survivors cope in this way, but many do.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“Perhaps one of the greatest harms the criminal justice system has done is persuaded us that we do not know how to solve the problems that arise between and amongst us. We have been taught that our experience is inconsequential in comparison to the evidence the "experts" present, and that the strategies we gravitate towards instinctively--calling each other's families first instead of the police, addressing the underlying causes of people's behavior, requiring people to give back to those they harmed--are somehow not only wrong, but socially irresponsible.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“I respect the time I spend each day treating my body, and I consider it part of my political work. It is possible to have some conscious input into our physical processes–not expecting the impossible, but allowing for the unexpected–a kind of training in self-love and physical resistance.”
― Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light

“The tensions created inside me by the contradictions is another source of energy and learning. I have always known I learn my most lasting lessons about difference by closely attending the ways in which the differences inside me lie down together.”
― Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light