One in Four

by Lucinda Berry

Other people’s tragedies always drew crowds.

She wanted to feel again. To come back inside the body. Her empty-balloon body. Filled with no air. She wanted to be back inside. Alive.

This had been our ritual for years. Me lying in the bath while she washed the horrible day off me.

It never gets easier to watch people destroy themselves.

I needed her light to cancel out all the darkness that was in me.

But addiction breeds in isolation, so I spend a lot of time encouraging social relationships.

That’s all addiction is based on—secrets.

Deep, dark, bury-yourself-in-your-unconsciousness kind of trauma.

Any good fighter will use whatever tactic they need to stay alive, and sometimes the best tactic in the world is to play dead.

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

I taught people to make friends with their brains rather than be at war with their thoughts.

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.

wealth didn’t get you sober, even if it might get you out of consequences.

by the time you recognize those signs, it’s already too late, and you can’t save anyone from a downward spiral if they’re intent on going down.

“I don’t enjoy the experience of living.”

How the bridge she ran by in the morning, swearing she was never drinking again and going to get sober, was the same bridge she had to talk herself out of jumping off every night when she was drunk.

That’s how we existed. The desolate on one side, searching in trash cans for the items rich folks threw away.

Addicts stop when they’re ready and not a moment sooner. It doesn’t matter how much you love them. Or equally hate them. Punish them. Reward them. Yell at them. Coddle them. There’s nothing you can do to keep an addicted person from using.

The ones that don’t are condemned to a fate almost worse than death—living the same miserable day over and over again.

Unconditional love and acceptance. That was always my mission. Coupled with personal empowerment and accountability.

That was what happened when you put such an emphasis on the amount of time sober. As if the number of days you were sober was a measure of your success. It created such a toxic shame cycle too.

She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. But at the same time she couldn’t sleep, she also couldn’t get out of bed.

Demon eyes always turned black. That’s how you could recognize sociopaths. By their abnormal brain waves and their black eyes.

one in four girls experience a form of sexual assault by the time they’re twenty-four.

For the first time ever, someone died around me and I wasn’t jealous of them.”

I don’t want to die as another statistic.”

I hated how the smallest bit of power went straight to some people’s heads.

addicts were some of the most heartbreaking people to love.

Truth was, hurting herself made her feel alive, if only for a split second.

He violated her body, but they raped her soul.

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.

And if things got any darker in her life, the light was going to go out completely.

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,”

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.

I slide into my car, hugging myself and rocking back and forth. I can’t help it. My body will explode and shatter into a thousand pieces if I don’t. My cells are already dividing. Coming apart at the cellular level.