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.
Here are some passing thoughts. Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing it burning. Imagine seeing the grocery store’s checkout girl grow horns. Imagine growing younger instead of older. Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold.
Dwarves are not heroes, but a calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect too much.
Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.
Soul of all souls, life of all life - you are That. _x000D_ Seen and unseen, moving and unmoving - you are That. _x000D_ The road that leads to the City is endless; _x000D_ Go without head and feet _x000D_ and you'll already be there. _x000D_ What else could you be? - you are That.
Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves.
I think it is incumbent on anyone who can to lift human dignity to the highest possible levels, maintaining one's own and helping to raise that of others.
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