You can live your whole life in your brain and not experience what's around you. You go crazy that way. That's why I have to watch myself when I get isolated for too long.
Fiona AppleRead
Rape is the most humiliating thing that can be done to you; it's the most vulnerable that you can be. But once I realized that, I became a stronger person and faced all my fears.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the profound humiliation of sexual assault but emphasizes the strength gained from overcoming fear and trauma.
Fiona Apple's quote addresses the profound psychological impact of rape, describing it as a deeply humiliating experience that strips away a person's sense of security and vulnerability. However, she highlights a transformative journey from this experience, suggesting that by confronting and acknowledging the trauma, one can emerge stronger and more resilient. This duality between vulnerability and strength underscores the complex nature of personal recovery and empowerment.
In practice
In a motivational speech addressing survivors of trauma.
You can live your whole life in your brain and not experience what's around you. You go crazy that way. That's why I have to watch myself when I get isolated for too long.
Because for whatever reason, even though I want to stay home all the time and be left alone, I want to tell the world who I am now.
I had really bad obsessive-compulsive disorder. At its worst, I was compelled to leave my house at three o'clock in the morning and go out in the alley because I just knew that the paper-towel roll I threw in the recycling bin was uncomfortable, like it was lying the wrong way, and I would be down in the garbage.
I don't want to give any advice to a 19-year-old, because I want a 19-year-old to make mistakes and learn from them. Make mistakes, make mistakes, make mistakes. Just make sure they're your mistakes.
Though dreams can be deceiving; like faces are to hearts, they serve for sweet relieving, when fantasy and reality lie too far apart.
I got into therapy in the fifth grade because I said in a sarcastic way that I was going to kill myself, and they didn't get it then. Nothing's changed.
There wasn't a game in the Eighties when you didn't get racial abuse as a black player.
Anti-Semitism hits me on the head: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being man. I cannot disassociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother.
My parents witnessed firsthand in Haiti that if you stop speaking up, one day you'll wake up afraid to speak. They came to America so they'd never be afraid of speaking up again.
Giving up is not the answer. Neither is giving in. Stand your ground. There is a way of doing that without having to be combative. There is a way of hanging on to your true self, and demonstrating it, without resorting to aggression. But giving up and giving in is not the way. Simply and quietly claiming your right to be You is the way.
We are bound no longer by the straitjacket of the past and nowhere is the change greater than in our profession of arms. What, you may well ask, will be the end of all of this? I would not know! But I would hope that our beloved country will drink deep from the chalice of courage.
There were many factors as to why I decided to come out as being undocumented. One of them is because I look the way that I look; I don't look like the 'stereotypical undocumented' person.
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