Madeline > Recent Status Updates

“Depression and shame force us to practice and rehearse powerlessness until it feels like a defining feature of who we are.”

“It’s difficult to pursue healing when you are certain you don’t deserve it or when you feel confident that all of your sadness is a reasonable response to a broken life, a flawed self, and a malicious world. What do I need to heal from? Being realistic? Paying attention?”

Shame as a valuable tool for depression to continue in the mind/masquerade behind “reality”

“Shame isn’t a creature of the here and now. It’s a tether to old mistakes, failed expectations, and predicted futures full of further disappointment. Shame is one way our human affinity for narrative becomes weaponized against us. With shame, we aren’t just a character in a cohesive storyline, we are the villain. The moral lesson of the tale centers on ourselves as examples of wrongdoing.”

“I entered a period in which the world had stopped being a source of wonder. The world was something to fend off; nature was a ghost in the attic, a memory of childhood. It wouldn’t pay my bills or quiet my persistent urge to end my life. A heron was a half remembered song from a dead age.”

“Convenience seduces us into losing our desire, confidence, and ability to do things for ourselves.”

Fast food values: not just about drive thrus, but how we have come to expect that all food be available at all times, taste the same, look the same, etc. and the alienation from the processes that create food that lead to environmental and societal degradation + author argues that all other issues in society relate back to this complex food system

“The power of food can change peoples’ lives, for better or for worse. Food can enhance our communities, humanize our institutions, and help heal and replenish the besieged environment. Or, food can destroy our health and our planet. We are all still witnessing the corruption and degradation of our lives and our environment, in this country and around the world, caused by the industrial food system.”

“I felt the possibility and potential of being part of a global food movement. That slogan from the 1970’s immediately came to mind: Think Globally, Act Locally.”

“Whole foods, or minimally processed foods such as canned beans or tomato paste, are what’s referred to in the food business as Commodities. They have such slim profit margins that they’re sometimes sold at or below cost as ‘loss leaders’ to attract customers in hopes that they’ll also buy the ‘value added’ products, the most profitable of which for producers and vendors.”

- artificial, UPF

“But, Aunt Adah, how can there be so many kinds of things a person doesn't really need?"
I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.

“Your father doesn’t love you, either” the baby says, his voice rich and deep, spittle flecking his plump lower lip. “Well, he doesn’t know me sufficiently yet,” I say.
“Only heirs are worthy of their father’s love.”

This book is literally grossing me out so bad 😭😭😭 not sure if my stomach can handle finishing. The evocative, disgusting body horror and evil behavior is a lot

3/3 I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.”

2/3 tells you it would be easier to be dead. So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for 23 years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button downs,

1/3 “He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who've simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and

2/2 If I'm honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.”

1/2 “She puts her arms around me and says, I am so happy right now. I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the cat turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore.

“Body neutrality offers a safe place to rest as you exit body hatred without putting pressure on you to somehow magically love every iota of your body and self. It gives you the ability to see yourself and the world clearly, which means you can take your emotional power back from the places that don’t deserve it and deescalate a lot of your triggers and spirals.”

“If I adopt a body neutral lens, I can just acknowledge that two things are true and neither of them is a problem. One true thing is that I get pimples and the other is that I don’t like when I get pimples. Neither of these facts means anything about me, neither affects my self worth, identity, or life, and neither has any moral value, significance, or power over me.”

“I wish I were smaller and that’s not a problem. I hate my stretch marks and that’s okay. I hate the way my (blank) looks and that’s okay. I’m so embarrassed by (blank) and that doesn’t mean anything bad about me.”

“It is not so bad to be an incubator. Everything I eat and drink feels like it amounts to something. Oysters, choc-olate, mangos drenched in chili oil, all for a purpose and all ex-cused, an education for the palate I am building with the most acute iterations of sugar and salt. But conversely, it is terrible being an incubator. Everything I do feels like it should amount to something.”

“God is not for women. He is for the fruit. He makes you want and he makes you wicked, and while you sleep, he plants a seed in your womb that will be born just to die.”

“I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.”

“I am afraid to own a body. I am afraid to own a soul. Profound, precarious property. Possession not optional.”

- Emily Dickinson

“I’d absorbed the feeling, familiar to anyone who has been labeled with anything from special needs student to troubled to problem child, that I might be dependent forever, unable to do the things that other people did with such ease.”

“For someone who had made a study of having the right language, I could never summon it when the subject was my own constantly fluctuating level of ease with the outside world.”

“The people who loved me seemed continually frustrated by what I could not seem to do; the basic niceties of human interaction I was unable to fake if the mood and circumstances were not exactly right. This must have seemed to the outside world like profound selfishness, but I felt continually frustrated by not having the words to explain the difference between won’t and can’t.“

“Usually, I was the friend who was curling into myself, pulling back from the world. I’d always wanted friends but had never known exactly what to do with them. If I had been know for anything in highschool, it was planning elaborate outfits for events that, at the last minute, I was too tired or terrified to attend.”

“We cling to our tragedy just as tightly as we cling to the things we love most, airtight explanations for what ails us.”