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“How do you know if you are going to die?” I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence she answered, “When you can no longer make a fist.” Naomi Shihab Nye, “Making a Fist”
But there are no real markers with therapy, nothing to say, “Here, I’ve reached this point, I’ve made progress.” It’s just a gradual shift so that one day you wake up and realize you don’t think like that anymore, or you’ve slept through the night for a while now, and maybe this is the new normal.
“Attending to your safety” is code for not wearing short skirts, or drinking in bars, or having any kind of life.
“People only listen when women expose their pain, I suppose. Why do you think it’s like that?”
the irony that she has to claim connection with one man to avoid another.
“Monsters don’t always look like something from a horror movie. Mostly, they just look like… normal guys.”
Why, Travis thinks, why why why would anyone find any pleasure in seeing women hurt, when it’s a billion times more pleasurable to see them happy?
Sometimes she thinks her survival has been the result of strength, and courage, and tenacity—all the good, virtuous foundations for survival. But now she thinks maybe she has survived out of pure spite.
She can be happy if she wants to be. She can live. She can be free. Travis was right—she is a fucking force of nature. She is the maelstrom. And she is mighty.
