For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the strength and resilience women display despite enduring pain and emotional damage.
In this quote, Dorothy Allison reflects on the internalized perceptions of strength and resilience, particularly among women. She describes the facade of being 'unbreakable' and highlights the stories and experiences carried within the body, showcasing how personal and collective histories of suffering can lead individuals to believe they are impervious to pain. This narrative challenges the notion of stoicism by revealing that true strength often lies in acknowledging and embracing one's vulnerability.
In practice
This quote would be perfect in a motivational speech about overcoming adversity.
Hunger makes you restless. you dream about food - not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.
Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.
There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.
And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
If you were a pure bolt of fire-cutting the skies I'd touch you-risking my life-not because I'm brave or strong, but because I'm fascinated by what the outcome would be.
My body is very different from most of the dancers I dance with. My hair is different than most I dance with. But I didn't let that stop me. Black girls rock and can be ballerinas.
I will always remember the first show I did clean and sober... It was in New Mexico, in Albuquerque. I literally felt elevated, as everything was coming with such clarity.
Coward dogs most spend their mouths when what they seem to threaten runs far before them.
I get stage fright and gremlins in my head saying: 'You're going to forget your lines'.
Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.
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