Glow (The Plated Prisoner, #4)
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11%
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“We’ve all got a little rotten in us, and I wouldn’t change that for anything. It’s how we’ve survived.”
12%
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“You don’t have to be cruel to be strong. You don’t have to be mean to seem brave. You don’t have to look down on others in order to stand tall. Having emotions does not mean you’re weak. It means you’re smart enough to let yourself feel.”
26%
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But the trauma on the inside, that’s harder to see. It creeps around your mind, poisons you with disquiet. It can hit you out of nowhere, debilitating and ruinous. There are no marks visible for those. None, save the shadows in your eyes.
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When you hit rock bottom, you feel it. You break down, walls crumbling until you’re free-falling. The feelings that you tried to run from suddenly rush up around you in an unstoppable force, the gravity of your thoughts now nothing but a punishing plunge. When you slam into the bottom, that landing jolts you all the way to your very soul. You hit hard, and it cracks the very foundation of the world. The ground fragments beneath you, lines stretching far and wide. And then you’re left, a pile of rubble.
26%
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But I realize something as I lie here, surrounded by the destruction of my plummet. These cracks that have spread out from my caustic landing, they’re not evidence of my ruination. They’re paths. Each jagged line leads from me and then diverts away, showing me all the different ways I could go from here.
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I can choose to stay stagnant here, at the bottom of the cliff, broken and unmoving. I can rage, I can wallow, I can blame, I can hide. I can let the severed parts of me sever all the rest. Or I can get up, dust myself off, and look back up. I can find a path that ensures I’ll never fall again, ensures that I don’t lose any more parts of myself. All I have to do is turn and follow my feet, one step at a time. So that’s what I’ll do.
27%
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I will never forget that feeling of utter helplessness. Perhaps things are born from trauma. An anger. A clarity. A beast.
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Maybe none of us truly know our own strength. Not until the world has hacked away at us. But the point is, we aren’t strong because of our trauma. We were always strong to begin with. We just needed to figure it out for ourselves.
42%
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“I needed to do that for myself. No one rescuing me. No one fighting my fight. It had to be me. Do you understand?”
42%
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I’ve always been more passive in life. I think passivity is often mistaken for weakness. Really, it’s just a different way to cope. To survive.
52%
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I’ll be the villain for you. Not to you.
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“If you’re a villain...then I’ll be a villain with you.”
56%
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With the right person, there is power when you kneel. There is adoration with submission. There is balance with control.
60%
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This is my power. I control it. It answers to me and me alone.
62%
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“One person’s pain doesn’t negate another’s. Our heartaches are not competition, but the bridge to empathy. So that we can look at one another and know that on some level, we understand. That’s one beautiful thing about grief, I think. That sometimes, we can find someone in the world to look at from the other side of the bridge of our torments and know that we are not alone.”