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Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it. —Audre Lorde
Depression, even when exacerbated by what they were going through, wasn’t a good excuse for treating loved ones badly. But she would use it, and he would take it.
“People in pain aren’t always the best communicators.”
Eve automatically recalled Don Draper delivering the line What is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness. She was a bit fascinated by the way white people—white men, especially—found it to be so elusive. Black folks rarely got to concern themselves with their version of happy. Didn’t ask for much beyond safety, financial stability, and family. Black happiness was too often rooted in plain old survival. White people seemed to define it by avoiding boredom.
When everyone around you seems okay, it’s hard not to wonder where you went wrong.”
Running from the rain, falling in the river.
Can I ask why you’re fantasizing about failing when you’re smack dab in the middle of succeeding?
He probably needed a therapist, but whiskey always worked much faster.
Nothin’ in a relationship is ever just one person’s fault.”
“The thing I hate about our relationship is I’m never sure whether I’m the disappointment or if they are.”
Eve smiled in spite of herself, her gaze flitting back to the card from her parents, and she wondered whether their wishes for her happiness would ever align with what actually made her happy.
No one got through life without at least a little damage, but being vulnerable anyway? That was where the magic happened.
“Je te le promets.”
Forgiveness really is for the forgiver.
“I don’t know if I want a baby or if I just wanted back what was taken from me.”
Dr. Garvey mentioned that significant adversity early in life—her pregnancy and everything surrounding it—could create a vulnerability to major depression later, as it sets the nervous system to overrespond to stress.
“What did you say about your parents when you first walked in here? How hard it is for you to move on when they won’t acknowledge the problem?”
Wounds heal; they don’t disappear.”
Once upon a time in Dollywood, she was almost happy. Almost.
“I know that was the line you held, but can I just ask why you think children should have to abide by rules they never agreed to in the first place? Who gets to decide that I’m Catholic?”
three-course West African meal of potato bhajias, suya kebabs, and mandazi.
it would make sense if her evening were just beginning.
Leaving home, in a sense, involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.
You’d just be doing something for yourself for once. Do what you want. Not what you think you have to do. You don’t get extra points for getting through life unhappily.”
‘Once we recognize what it is we’re feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.’ ”
