Kindle Notes & Highlights
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March 4 - March 16, 2024
Writing my name on the board that day in the woods was like performing an exorcism.
Reluctantly, I folded my longing for him like a handkerchief and tucked it away; there wouldn’t be any more tears.
What kind of a man uses his erect penis, like the pointed, glistening tip of a blade, to butcher the trust of a child?
Self-reflection is necessary for personal growth.
Healing is about much more than remembering. Healing is about reinterpreting events, aligning the fiction with the fact.
The way I saw it, all of the adults in my life were either physically or emotionally unavailable. All except Jonathan.
Most of the poems I wrote then were confessional; they were reconstructions of my spirit, my body—on those pages, I gave birth to myself.
Meri Danquah was not who I would become or pretend to be; it wasn’t a persona. It was me, who I had been all along.
Sex meant everything and, at the same time, nothing to me. It meant being held, being wanted. It was a safe place for tears and for reassurance. When I cried, my lovers wiped my eyes; they pulled me closer, softened their voices, and gave me what I believed was the best of themselves.
It just boiled down to the simple fact that I didn’t want people thinking I was crazy.
In fact, it was more like a swan song. A keen and supplicating, yet, ultimately, conclusive melody. She’s going to kill herself, I thought.
What you’re looking at is a figment of your imagination. It isn’t really me.”
suicide is a synonym for escape.
Never had I heard depression being referred to as an issue concerning African Americans, much less a plague.
And we suffer alone because we don’t know that there are others like us.
Immigrant and skin color progression of depression
What I did know was that as much as we cherished our relationship, it was hard for us to be together. My guess is that her sadness rubbed off on me, as I am sure mine did on her.
Two people—two sisters—in the same family were being debilitated by the exact same disease. What did that mean? Was it bad genes or bad luck? Or a bad combination of both? It didn’t matter.
This is truly pitiful, I thought; you are an alcoholic.
He was displaying a level of personal investment in my wellness that I had never noticed before.
I am black; I am female; I am an immigrant. Every one of these labels plays an equally significant part in my perception of myself and the world around me.
Only Jade would take a Sylvia Plath book with her to the psych ward.
“I may not be able to see your heart, but I can sure see your face, and it’s telling me that you are full of dreams.”
But she was not a poem; she was a novel, a narrative that was unfolding day by day, page by page.
All along while I was sending my mother reviews, articles, poems, trying to get some praise or encouragement, she was keeping a scrapbook!?
All clinical depressions are a mixture of the emotional and the biochemical; the illness exists somewhere in that ghost space between consciousness and chemistry.
Sadness was as thick a bond between us as blood.
It showed us firsthand that even though illnesses might not discriminate, we live in a world where people do.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence,” the poet Audre Lorde wrote, “it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
