Allison Holm

“I believe that everyone has this tendency to think in circles, trying to neutralize what we cannot control. We lock ourselves up, hoping to protect against the inevitable. We write rules and laws, we draw arbitrary comparisons. We make judgments. We skirt past the unfamiliar alleyways and hold our breath past graveyards. We do all of these things to protect ourselves from the absolute terror of pure being, and yet they accomplish nothing...So if I have advice for you it is this. Imagine the worst thing in the world. Think the unthinkable. Find the hidden places where you refuse to trespass, those principles that you have sworn never to break; and then start to consider what, perhaps, might happen to you if you broke them. Recognize when you are afraid and learn when you cannot protect yourself. Learn to accept horrible and inevitable things. Learn to be heartbroken, to be hopeless, and then to get better....Do terrifying things. Live. (258-9)”
― Fletcher Wortmann, Triggered: A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder