Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a struggle with inner turmoil and the desire to eliminate negative parts of oneself rather than life itself.
In this quote, Susanna Kaysen expresses a profound conflict within herself related to suicidal thoughts. She conveys that her battle is not necessarily against life itself but rather against the darker aspects of her psyche that lead her to contemplate self-harm. This suggests a recognition of one's own suffering and the desire to overcome it by confronting and transforming the parts of oneself that foster despair.
In practice
During a mental health awareness event, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of confronting our struggles.
Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60's. Or maybe I was just a girl... interrupted.
I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.
Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination, velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it, even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself. I was demonstrating externally and irrefutably an inward condition.
Don't separate the mind from the body. Don't separate even character - you can't. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously. Disease is one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.
I've always embraced failure as a noble pursuit. It allows you to be anti whatever anyone wants you to be, and to break all the rules.
I think there's something peculiar about me that I haven't died. It doesn't make sense but I refuse to die.
Could it be ... that the hero is one who is willing to set out, take the first step, shoulder something? Perhaps the hero is one who puts his foot upon a path not knowing what he may expect from life but in some way feeling in his bones that life expects something of him.
My old man says when it's time to be counted, the important thing is to be man enough to stand up.
Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment.
Let bravery be thy choice, but not bravado.
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