Madeline > Recent Status Updates

“The genitals may learn to associate certain stimuli with certain physiological responses that may have no association with desire or even pleasure.”

- Arousal non-concordance: bodily response to sexual stimuli without actually wanting to have sex.
Explains assault victims’ bodies responding sexually, even as their brains are flooded with fear and disgust.

Envisioning the “lion” of self criticism as a sweet little kitten who simply needs nurturing and kindness

2/2 —trying to address it in therapy, trying to excise it with understanding, only to realize while he was dying that he'd never really found the level of peace he'd wanted, never tasted freedom from his own depression.”

1/2 “I thought about my father that morning. I thought about the sense of sorrow that had seemed to bind us for so long, that sense of deep dissatisfaction, of being slightly off so often. I thought about how he'd lived his whole life with that feeling

“I thought about Ernest Hemingway, who'd killed himself with a twelve-gauge shotgun, and about James Agee, who died of alcoholism at the age of forty five. I had a dark, heavy sense of resignation, inevitability, as though I were in a box and simply couldn't get out.”

“I would remember that moment, that glimpse of myself as a drunk young woman at a party. Not a pretty young woman, not a sophisticated young woman. A drunk, out of control.”

“My mother had lived this way, unable to leave a man who never quite left her feeling appreciated or fully loved, and my father had lived this way, torn between two relationships, saddled with chronic ambivalence, unable to wrench himself free of the complicated, duplicitous patterns he'd established.”

“I’d always wondered what those drives had been like for him, how it must have felt to be sitting there on the vinyl seat beside a thin, mute daughter, what it must have been like to see yourself in someone else and not be able to find any comfortable ground, anyplace to connect.”

“My parents' house felt so loaded with illness and anger and unresolved bits of history it was hard to walk inside without feeling like you had to hold your breath. Details about my father's betrayal would emerge, erupting like volcanoes—he'd given the woman money; he'd taken her on a trip—and they'd fill the house with a bitterness you could practically taste.“

“Hitting bottom is usually something that happens internally, where no one else can see it.”

The gift of desperation: an elusive combination of despair and grace that signals to yourself that it’s time to stop drinking, time to save yourself

2/2 and lived through those moments of profound disappointment when you look into the eyes of someone you love and see that they are unable to meet every single one of your needs.”

1/2 “It never occurred to me that people like John and Andrea (who are, in fact, a very happily married couple) might have worked very hard to build the relationship they had, that they might have gone through great periods of doubt with one another, and struggled to accept each other's limits,

“Alcoholics drink in order to ease the very pain that drinking helps create. That's another one of the great puzzles behind liquor, the great paradoxes. You hurt, you drink; you hurt some more, you up the intake. In the process, of course, you lose any chance you might have had to heal authentically.”

Disgust is a socially learned response/emotion in most cases

How do our disgust responses hinder or hurt us?

We judge as wrong anything associated w/ lowness. In the judeo-Christian ethic, bodies are low and spirit is high. Animals low/human reason high. Women low/men high.

Sex draws attention downwards to the base, the animal, the contemptible, and therefore triggers a disgust response.

- not true of all cultures, some are deeply sex positive or see different sexual acts/bodies as sanctified/glorious/sacred

2/2 Humans have generalized from avoidance of physical contaminants (innately repelled by rotting corpses) to avoidance of conceptual contaminants (we can be repelled just by the words ‘rotting corpses’)

Sanctity: a vertical axis w/ stigmatized and taboo behaviors described as low and dirty & socially sanctioned behaviors as high and pure.

1/2 Moral foundations theory: Jonathon Hite/ 6 moral foundations in the human brain, each of which is a solution to a particular evolutionary problem our species have faced.

Of the 6, Sanctity/degradation moral foundation most relevant to sex. About contaminant avoidance and powered by disgust.

Sexual disgust: a learned withdrawal response from things that are “gross”

- what happens when that same sexual disgust is triggered by one’s own body?

“You know who’s always thin? People who have been living in a prison camp.”

uhhh that’s a pretty distasteful thing to say / in the discussion on weight loss, cultural notions of whose body is ideal, etc.

- it used to be a status symbol for a man to have a wife who is too weak to work bc that showed that he could afford to run the whole house w his income

“Self criticism is one of the best predictors of loneliness.”

curious about this statistic… is it a chicken and egg type of thing? Or does being more self critical drive people away? Or being lonely makes you more self critical?

“We can’t understand women’s sexual satisfaction without thinking about body satisfaction, just as we can’t understand women’s sexual pleasure without thinking about attachment and stress. Women will not be fully, blissfully satisfied with their sex lives until they are fully, blissfully satisfied with their own bodies.”

“I wonder if living in the valley so long has made it impossible to live anywhere else.”

“I wonder if we died the second we left the valley and ever since then we’ve just been wandering around in hell.”

“What makes me so uniquely unlovable?
My monotonous voice? My lack of arms? I wish I could put a hand on the shoulder of a friend… lean in, and with a warm, sing-song intonation… ask them questions about computers.”

“Richard told me I would never be able to love someone else until I learned to love myself. I have never found that to be the case. I hate myself, yet have found it exceptionally easy to love someone else. I suppose I’m a sort of medical marvel.”

“Do you ever have one of those days where you start thinking about how wonderful Richard is and begin to weep uncontrollably?”

“Sometimes I look up at the stars and imagine a giant telescope staring back at me, studying my every move… watching me make the worst choices of my life. Learn from my mistakes, space folk! Let me be a teachable moment in your space academies!”

“Ms. Napkin, can you confirm the rumors that spiders and squirrels make the best of friends?”

“No comment!”

“Many outsiders wouldn’t believe it, but there are a ton of ways to have fun and pass time in the valley!
Drawing pictures of Richard!
Organizing leaves!
Putting on skits and plays!
Making lists of all the bad things I’ve done!
Imagining me and Richard as the only two survivors after the apocalypse!”

“Women have cultural permission to criticize ourselves, but we are punished if we praise ourselves. If we dare to say that we like ourselves as we are.”

Ex: showing up to dinner w friends and saying ‘I feel so beautiful today!’ would typically be seen as outlandish/narcissistic, but showing up and saying ‘I feel so fat today’ is totally normal