Many times, I left the prison thinking, 'I'm smart. I can make it. I won't get caught up again.' But you get off downtown Skid Row, and you're a target for all of the environmental harms in that area. The pain and trauma in that area is so thick, you can almost reach your hand out and touch it.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the challenges of recovery and the impact of environment on personal growth.
Susan Burton's quote illustrates the struggle of overcoming past hardships while highlighting how one's environment can influence their ability to break free from cycles of trauma and despair. She emphasizes that even with the ambition to succeed, the surrounding influences of pain and trauma can become overwhelming and hinder progress.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the importance of community support in recovery programs.
People are released from prison so unprepared. They give you $200. We call it gate money. And you have to pay for a bus ticket back to L.A. You get off the Greyhound bus, downtown Skid Row, and you're supposed to make a life from that.
We're willing to spend countless dollars putting people who need help in cages, and then when they get out we say you can't have a job, and you can't have housing, and because you don't have either, we're going to take your kids, too.
I knew hundreds and hundreds of women like me, who had traveled in and out of prison in a revolving door. They needed support and help just like I had received. And it could make a difference, just like it had made a difference in my life. I wanted to see them come back to the community and have a chance at a different life, too.
She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.
Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was 26. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're 34.
You must pay the penalty of growing-up, Paul. You must leave fairyland behind you.
The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never feel big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, your arm itches, or what people are saying strikes you as melodramatic or sentimental, and it's hard not to smirk. You have a sense of what this type of situation should be like - for one thing, all-consuming - and this isn't it. But then you look back, and it was that; it did happen.
While complying can be an effective strategy for physical survival, it's a lousy one for personal fulfillment. Living a satisfying life requires more than simply meeting the demands of those in control. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement. The former might get you through the day, but only the latter will get you through the night.
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.