Noel’s Reviews > What You Become in Flight > Status Update

“I used to think just naming my fear was courageous. But I realized that trying to heal was even braver. It was never the feat that defined me. It was my resolve to face it that showed who I am. Phobias and their treatment are a series of building up and breaking down defenses, of trying and failing and trying again. The same could be said of love.”

“Using my voice feels like assertion, activism, consent in the stories in which I participated. Using my voice liberates me, and when there isn’t a place for the story I wanted to tell, I write it down instead.”

“The silence of victims of violence is the silence of women who have been told their stories aren’t believable. When I was nineteen, I refused my own voice, thinking it was too quiet, but as an adult, I feel fully charged.”

“Every woman who survives will have to keep surviving for the rest of her life, holding her own story so it’s not dismissed, erased, written over by someone with a louder voice. Every woman who tells her story of survival will be telling a story of victory.”

“Maybe being human means depending on someone for some form of safety, the precarious state in which we all find ourselves. It might mean there can never be such thing as safety from the very forces that threaten us, although there are so many ways we pretend we are, and so many times we put ourselves in each other’s hands and still survive.”

“Because writing gave me the voice I felt robbed of in ballet, I wrote things down as soon as they happened, no longer forced to cobble together my memories to find meaning. My voice, after all, gave me recourse. I could name the distinct power of saying ‘no.’ And ‘enough.’”

“And by now I was getting it, that the silence of victims of violence leaves too much room for the voices of others. To fill the space, I had to practice using my voice and telling the truth.”

“My life, perhaps like the lives of all or most women, has been punctuated by the violence of girl- and womanhood, which once paralyzed me into a sort of stunned silence. But knowing my silence was expected made me want to use my voice more—I’d spent so much time trying to forget the quiet, acquiescent ballerina id wanted to be.”

“Decisions I make since the shooting near my work are based on instinct, the fear of violence stored in my bones as surely as the pain in my spine. I think about the bounty of life as often as I remember its fragility. If life were not fragile, we would not protect it so.”

“Every day I am here I can reinvent my own responses to violence. I can recognize we are all beholden to fear and risk and blame, and just as beholden to the tenderness and healing we try to force so soon after tragedy. Those feelings, too, are as inevitable as nightfall.”