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.
The truth of Nature is a part of the truth of God; to him who does not search it out, darkness; to him who does, infinity.
I'm fairly convinced that the Kingdom of God is for the broken-hearted. You write of 'powerlessness.' Join the club, we are not in control. God is.
The contemporary Christian mind is starved, and as a result we have small, impoverished souls.
Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.
Evolution is the creation-myth of our age. By telling us our origin it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological theory.
By opening our lives to God in Christ, we become new creatures. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists . . . Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.
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