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These days, it felt like every neighborhood in Boston was being gentrified, developers coming in, razing the old, and replacing it with bigger and better.
It’s true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But no one says that strength doesn’t come at a price.
Stockholm syndrome is when a victim starts to bond with her captor, partially due to the captor’s role of complete power over her life.
The truth is, genius and depression have always gone hand in hand. Which was why I spent so many afternoons, sitting at the piano, playing and playing, because my father said my music soothed his spirit and allowed him to rest in a way a truly great mind could never completely be at ease. I did my best to music the sadness out of him.
MEMORY IS A FUNNY THING. There are moments that sear into our minds. If we’re lucky, it’s because we’re happy—first kiss, wedding day, birth of a child. The kind of experience where you both have it and stand outside of it because your brain recognizes this is something so special that you’re going to want to relive it.
“People think trauma is mental,” I say abruptly. “I’m mentally scarred, damaged, take your pick. And with enough therapy, time, my mind will heal and, ta-da, one day I’ll be all better again. But trauma isn’t just mental. It’s physiological. It’s an adrenal system that’s totally burnt out, so that I spend days at a time in fight mode.” I realize as I’m describing this that one of my knees is bouncing uncontrollably. “Followed by crashes where I can barely get out of bed.
The worst part of being a survivor: There’s no security blanket anymore. You can’t assume the worst won’t happen, because it did. And none of your screaming changed that.
And I won’t stand in a corner anymore. I will step up. I will become part of the world I live in, even when it’s scary. Because life is scary, but it still beats the alternative.
