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.
I inherited depression from my mother's side of the family. Her father committed suicide. She committed suicide the year before I went to the moon.
A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong.
It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.
In my life as a soldier and citizen, I have seen time and time again that inaction has dire consequences.
We’re constantly being bombarded by problems that we face and sometimes we can get completely overwhelmed. [But] we should always feel like a hummingbird. I may feel insignificant, but I don’t want to be like the other animals watching the planet go down the drain. I’ll be a hummingbird, I’ll do the best I can.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.
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