Nada S’J’s Reviews > Notes to John > Status Update

“He had mentioned, last week, a certain surprise at my actual strength. I said I had been thinking about this, and had wondered if a lot of what looked like strength wasn't just a highly developed capacity to compartmentalize.”

I said I knew she had always thought of me as fragile.

"She does. I would imagine most people do. It's not just your physical fragility, it's the way you relate to people, the closeness of your emotion to the surface - everything about your emotional tone seems fragile. But you're not. You're really extremely strong."

“But sometimes things happen in our lives that overtake even the most well-constructed defences.”

“I realised that I had a very closely calibrated idea of my physical well-being, very fearful of losing control, that my personality was organised around a certain level of mobilisation or an anxiety.”