Jacey Davis > Jacey's Quotes

“Like so many other high school discipline cases, he'd probably been given some hybrid cockamamie ADHD- bipolar diagnosis at a very young age and been medicated into submission for the benefit of his homeroom teacher. We've all read about them in the paper, the problem kids who get slapped with five disorders by the time they're twelve, and horse-pilled by a culture that has pathologized everything from PMS to teen angst.”
― Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

“So, please people, if you know someone with AD(H)D, don’t try to change that about them. Don’t take that one skill away, or make them feel ashamed to use it. Sometimes procrastination is all they have in their little superhero tool belt!”
― Stacey Turis, Here's to Not Catching Our Hair on Fire: An Absent-Minded Tale of Life with Giftedness and Attention Deficit - Oh Look! A Chicken!

“This is not a contest with your child. The winner is not the one with more points. The winner is the one whose child still loves them when they graduate from high school.”
― Martin L. Kutscher, ADHD - Living without Brakes

“I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.”
― Kiera Van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline

“People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.”
― Marsha Linehan

“They love without measure those whom they will soon hate without reason.”
― Thomas Sydenham, The Whole Works of That Excellent Practical Physician, Dr. Thomas Sydenham: Wherein Not Only the History and Cures of Acute Diseases Are Treated of ... from the Original Latin, by John Pechey ...

“To stave off the panic associated with the absence of a primary object, borderline patients frequently will impulsively engage in behaviors that numb the panic and establish contact with and control over some new object.”
― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother

“Cincinatti was where I learned that running away from your problems has a three-month statute of limitations, a lesson I have found repeatedly to be true. Three months is still a first impression -- of a city, of other people, of yourself in that place. But there comes a point when you can no longer hide who you are, and the reactions of others become all too familiar...”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging showing that patients with BPD have hyperactivity in the limbic areas of the brain, especially the amygdala, and hypoactivity in the prefrontal cortex [and] in complex interaction with childhood trauma common among borderline patients, can result in the . . . behavior recognized as the symptoms of BPD: impulsive aggression, lack of affective control, and a profound mistrust born out of early disruption in the development of emotional attachment.8 Obviously, psychological theories for BPD”
― Cathy Wiseman, Borderline Personality: A Scriptural Perspective

“I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I'd wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very heigh of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her, but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could full. I'd have to fill it myself again and again and again.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“There is an emptiness inside of me -- a void that will never be filled. No one in your life will ever love you as your mother does. There is no love as pure, unconditional and strong as a mother's love. And I will never be loved that way again.”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss

“When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, prepared to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways.”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss

“Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, “I won’t be a mother anymore.” The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relationship survives. (It changes, but it survives.)”
― John Green

“If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.”
― Brené Brown

“The problem with having problems is that ‘someone’ always has it worse.”
― Tiffany Madison, Black and White

“These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“But for us the tragedy was but just beginning; as in the case of other wounds the pain was drugged at the moment, and made itself felt afterwards when we began to move. There was pain in all our circumstances, or a dull discomfort, a kind of restlessness and aimlessness which was even worse. Misery of this kind tends to concentrate itself upon an object, if it can find one, and there was a figure, unfortunately, who would serve our purpose very well.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“I'll drive like my grandma. I'll drive like your grandma."
"You wouldn't say that if you knew my gramma.”
― Kami Garcia, Beautiful Creatures

“Deep in earth my love is lying
And I must weep alone.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Noise and activity are the refuges of the bereaved and the guilty.”
― Veronica Roth, Insurgent

“Holding the knife with the blade against my palm, it became so clear how my life would only contain shadows now. Shadows of things gone; not just the people themselves but everything connected to them. Was this my future? Every moment, every tiny thing I saw and did and touched, weighted by loss. Every space in this house and
my town and the world in general, empty in a way that could never be filled.”
― Jennifer Castle, The Beginning of After

“We are often told during times of bereavement that time heals all wounds. That's crap. In truth, you are devastated, you mourn, you cry to the point where you think you'll never stop - and then you reach a stage where the survival instinct takes over. You stop. You simply won't or can't let yourself "go there" anymore because the pain was too great. You block. You deny. But you don't really heal.”
― Harlan Coben, Live Wire

“An odd by-product of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“They should make earplugs for people who are grieving, so we don't have to hear the stupid things people say, but I'd look like a dork in them." -Corinna”
― Carole Geithner, If Only

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about the toothache an about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“grief is a house
where the chairs
have forgotten how to hold us
the mirrors how to reflect us
the walls how to contain us

grief is a house that disappears
each time someone knocks at the door
or rings the bell
a house that blows into the air
at the slightest gust
that buries itself deep in the ground
while everyone is sleeping

grief is a house where no one can protect you
where the younger sister
will grow older than the older one
where the doors
no longer let you in
or out”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere