One in Four

by Lucinda Berry

Other people’s tragedies always drew crowds.

It’s not just fight or flight. Sometimes it’s freeze.

Women had to be put together if they wanted to be taken seriously. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. But it was the patriarchy we lived in.

Becoming conscious is so painful.

Most addicts are jealous of the ones that die because they’re finally free.

You never feel more alive than in the seconds after you’ve almost died.

She didn’t put the belt around her neck because she wanted to die. She did it because she wanted to feel alive.

That’s the thing about trauma. You never get to go back to who you were before it happened. It doesn’t matter how badly you might want to or how hard you try. That person is gone. Along with that life. It’s a marker that forever changes you. And if it doesn’t? Well, then it wasn’t real trauma. Because real trauma? You’re altered forever. Anything else is just a hard time.

“You’ve got to just let it go. You can’t live in the past. Eventually, if you want to have any kind of meaningful life, you have to forgive yourself and move forward. There’s nothing else you can do. You’ll torture yourself forever and live in agony if you never stop trying to figure out what happened in that other life,”

Hurting other people made them feel good. That’s what this world was full of. People that preyed on others’ misery and enjoyed it.

Funny—I’d spent so much of my life wanting to die, but now that the possibility was right in front of me, the only thing I wanted to do, more than anything else, was live.

Angry white boys—especially the entitled ones—were the scariest mammals.