I live in the borderlands. The word ghost sounds like memory. The word therapy means exorcism. My visions echo and multiplymultiply. I don't know how to figure out what they mean. I can't tell where they start or if they will end. But I know this. If they shrink my head any more, or float me away on an ocean of pills, I will never return.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the complex relationship between memory, mental health, and the struggle with inner demons.
In this quote, Laurie Halse Anderson explores the nuances of living in a state of mental and emotional turmoil. The references to ghosts and therapy suggest a struggle with past memories and the process of healing, where therapy can feel like an exorcism of one's inner ghosts. The speaker expresses a profound uncertainty about the future and the effects of medication on their sense of self, emphasizing the importance of recognizing one's struggles without losing one's identity in the process.
In practice
During a mental health awareness talk, I could reference this quote to illustrate the complexity of therapy.
Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can’t let go of the past.
Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it. . . . Someone just ripped off my eyelids.
This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.
A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.
I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.
If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.
To put up with what you cannot avoid is a philosophical principle, that may not perhaps lead you to the accomplishment of great deeds, but is assuredly eminently practical.
Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.
The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.
There is a purpose to our lives, even if it is sometimes hidden from us, and even if the biggest turning points and heartbreaks only make sense as we look back, rather than as we are experiencing them. So we might as well live life as if - as the poet Rumi put it - everything is rigged in our favor.
Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance, of the paternalist.
I could go insane if I obsessed over every little detail of all of my companies. My management philosophy is to pay attention to the vital few and ignore the trivial many.
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