I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?
Interpretation
This quote reflects the struggle to cope with past experiences and seek a path forward despite confusion and pain.
In this quote, Laurie Halse Anderson expresses the chaotic emotions that accompany survival through difficult experiences. The speaker acknowledges their confusion and issues but also seeks a way to confront and cut through their painful memories and fears, suggesting a desire for healing and clarity in their journey of self-discovery.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges, I would use this quote to illustrate the struggle of finding strength in difficult times.
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.
As you move outside of your comfort zone, what was once the unknown and frightening becomes your new normal.
I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to give if she asserts her will.
As Americans, we can take enormous pride in the fact that courage has been inspired by our own struggle for freedom, by the tradition of democratic law secured by our forefathers and enshrined in our Constitution. It is a tradition that says all men are created equal under the law and that no one is above it.
I did community theater for a long time and never had an agent. And then I got an agent and I remember that was my introduction to her telling me I wasn't enough as I was. She told me, 'You're going to have to change your hair. No one wants to see a Black woman with dreadlocks on television.' And I believed it.
They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house?
Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.
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