I'm grateful for rain because, when I was kidnapped, that meant that I had something to drink.
Elizabeth SmartRead
Privacy is so sacred, and any time a victim is returned, a survivor is found and rescued, privacy is one of the greatest gifts we can give them because if they decide to share, that's up to them, and they will come forward.
Interpretation
Privacy is essential for survivors to feel safe and in control of their own narrative.
In this quote, Elizabeth Smart emphasizes the importance of privacy for victims and survivors of trauma or abuse. She asserts that allowing survivors the space and choice to share their experiences is a profound gift, as it empowers them to regain control and decide how and when they wish to communicate their stories. The act of respecting their privacy not only supports their healing process but also facilitates their potential to come forward on their own terms.
In practice
During a speech about trauma recovery to emphasize the importance of personal space.
I'm grateful for rain because, when I was kidnapped, that meant that I had something to drink.
Yesterday from my office window I saw a crippled girl negotiating her way across the street, her shoulders squarely braced. At each jerky movement her hair flew back like an annunciatory angel, and I saw she was the only dancer on the street.
How can I be kind? How can I find bird-relief in the nest-building of day-to-day? Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape. I am indeed and mortally pierced with the seeds of love.
That happened to me, but I'm so much more than that girl that was kidnapped.
Even when I get on airplanes, very often, as I walk down the aisle, I notice a lot of people staring or whispering. I recognize the fact that yes, to a lot of people, I will always be that 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped and who was held captive.
I think forgiveness is probably one of the greatest forms of self-love there is because you don't do forgiveness for anybody else. My captors will never care if I forgive them... It will not make a day of difference to them at all, but it will make a huge difference to me.
I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.
New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.
What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.
The life of many a person could probably be changed if only someone would make him feel important.
It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.
One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.
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