I don't have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here.
Interpretation
People often act out destructively when they feel disconnected from their origins and seek to assert their presence in the world.
Lidia Yuknavitch's quote explores the idea that individuals may engage in negative behaviors as a means of coping with feelings of disconnection and isolation. When people struggle with their identity or feel estranged from their familial roots, they may resort to actions that are rebellious or destructive, aiming to recreate their narrative and assert that they exist and matter in the broader context of society. The quote suggests a profound understanding of human behavior that stems from a desire for recognition and belonging.
In practice
In a speech about youth addiction, one might use this quote to illustrate the struggles individuals face in searching for identity.
I'm in love with language again because Luke B. Goebel is not afraid to take us back through the gullet of loss into the chaos of words. Someone burns a manuscript in Texas; someone's speed sets a life on fire; a heart is beaten nearly to death, the road itself is the trip, a man is decreated back to his animal past--better, beyond ego, beautiful, and look: there's an American dreamscape left. There's a reason to go on.
This is something I know: damaged women? We don't think we deserve kindness. IN fact, when kindness happens to us, we go a little berserk. It's threatening. Deeply. Because if I have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit that I hid the me who deserves it down in a sadness well.
People - I mean couples - don't like to talk much about fighting. It's not attractive. No one likes to admit it or describe it or lay claim to it. We want our coupledoms to look... sanitized and pretty and worthy of admiration. And anger blasts are ugly. But, I think that is a crock. There is a kind of fighting that isn't ugly. There is a way for anger to come our as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage.
Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?
If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy.
It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.
Meditation is not 'going somewhere;' it's diving deep here, this moment.
If life were stable, I'd never need God's help.
Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?
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