Nikki > Nikki's Quotes

“A writer friend who is a practicing therapist as well once told me this is why writers write. They don’t feel seen. I”
― Chloe Caldwell, I'll Tell You in Person

“In Buddhism, the term hungry ghost refers to the person whose appetite exceeds their capacity for satisfaction. The visual of a hungry ghost is a Buddha-ghost with a tiny mouth and an enormous stomach. They’re greedy, starved for money, sex, drugs, power, status, all the good stuff. More is never enough.”
― Chloe Caldwell, I'll Tell You in Person

“By the early 1800s, these prison/asylums in western Europe were, therefore, populated mostly by criminals, drunkards, heretics and the blasphemous, the unemployed, the homeless, and the physically handicapped, but only occasionally by the people we today would think of as having mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities. The only thing the residents had in common was that they didn’t work.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Nor were there insane asylums, just general asylums for the lawless and unproductive. Some of the first insanity laws in Italy and England during the nineteenth century stipulated that harmless mentally ill patients should live with their families, even if it meant they were confined to a small outbuilding or chained to a tree.17”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“And, over time, urban-industrialized society would become increasingly responsible for controlling people whose differences might have been tolerated at home.21”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Until the late 1700s, there wasn’t even a separate anatomical lexicon for the female genitalia. The clitoris was called a penis, the uterus an internal scrotum. The ovaries were testicles, the vulva and labia were foreskin, the vagina was an inverted penis, and the fallopian tubes were the epididymis. In fact, as any twenty-first-century biologist will tell you, these are indeed homologous pairs of organs, and the male and female genitalia look virtually identical in the first trimester of a fetus. There were, of course, two genders—man and woman—but those identities came from society not nature. When Marie Garnier became a man, her gender changed but not her sex.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“In this one-sex world, Queen Elizabeth I could refer to herself as both a feeble virgin and the nation’s husband, and artists could represent Eve’s partner, Adam, as pregnant.3 Before the Enlightenment, there were even paintings of Christ with breasts.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“By the early 1800s, the reverse was true in European thought. Society had previously defined sex; now sex would define society. In the precapitalist one-sex world, one could move, like Marie Garnier, along the continuum of maleness. In the two-sex world, populated by both males and females, sex was fixed and inscribed in medical texts with new words to describe the female anatomy. Today we tend to think about sexual fluidity as something modern, but the reality is that sex has been fixed for only two centuries of the long history of Western civilization, and a number of non-Western societies have, for generations, recognized three, four, or five sexes, and with little or no stigma.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“This rather abrupt change from one sex to two sexes was not the result of any new knowledge of the female or male body. Scientists knew little more about human anatomy in 1800 than they did in 1700. What changed was the demand for a division of human beings into stable categories, a demand that was essential for social order in an increasingly industrialized Europe. Science, in other words, didn’t change anything on its own but rather did the work of culture by defining a new reality. And in this world, there was little room for any idea that sex was a spectrum or continuum along which humans could move. A clear-cut distinction between male and female roles, and between the home and work, the private and public spheres, was essential, even if in most industrial English working-class families both men and women worked. An ideology of manliness, male privilege, and superiority also fit well with the new image of the strong, independent male worker who was at no risk of becoming as soft and vulnerable as men believed women to be. In the one-sex world,”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“But early capitalism did more than just separate men and women into distinct sexes. It made it possible for men to subordinate women in a new kind of hierarchical social order. The world was now comprised of males who gained prestige by killing (for example, as hunters or soldiers), and females who were destined by nature to give life; creative males who altered the earth through agriculture, art, architecture, and other kinds of production, and procreative females who merely reproduced. Women, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, were “more enslaved” to the animality of the human species.10”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Similarly, the ancient Greeks did not classify people as homosexual or heterosexual. They only classified as “sexual deviants” people who committed sexual acts deemed inappropriate. Same-sex sex was more often than not totally acceptable. It was acceptable if the dominant or insertive partner was of higher status than the passive or receptive partner. For example, if a man had insertive sex with a boy, a male slave, or a woman, the act was not distinguished from any other kind of appropriate sex.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“In fact, homosexuality was one of the key psychological conditions that helped psychiatry remain a method to regulate behavior. By turning homosexuality into a mental illness in the first half of the twentieth century, psychologists and psychiatrists would highlight the dangers of sex and sexuality, as a watch tower in the center of a prison yard illuminates everything around it. Psychopathology was the alibi for surveillance and discipline.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“26 Europeans, and especially poor Europeans, with mental or physical illnesses were usually hidden from African view as much as possible, a common colonial practice, to preserve the image of white people as elites with healthy bodies and superior mentalities.27”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“What colonial psychiatrists did not understand was that the symptoms of mental illnesses are inevitably local. Most societies view emotional and physical sicknesses as a problem of the community that therefore demands a social rather than an individual therapeutic response.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Systems of healing that do not hew to the orthodoxy of Western individualism have found ways to protect the sufferer. They deflect responsibility away from the individual and the individual’s brain, and in the best of circumstances they harness the social supports that, even the most Eurocentric doctors will confess, lessen the pain of mental illness. As we now turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, we’ll see that European and North American psychiatry continued to shame and discredit the individual sufferer, but that stigma decreases when a society accepts some of the blame.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“By the time he settled in Chicago in the late 1800s, the so-called ugly law was in place to warn the public of the dangers of the poor and the disabled. The ordinance, which the city repealed only in 1973, labeled as a criminal anyone who was obviously “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed” and who “expose[d] himself to public view.”1 Newspapers demeaned women and the disabled in the same breath, writing that women were so weak that they could be traumatized by coming into contact with someone with a disability: “The consequences to a lady in delicate health of having a repulsive deformity suddenly presented to her by an abrupt appeal for charity might be serious.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Women serving as nurses and ambulance drivers in WWI also experienced shell shock, but they were typically not diagnosed or treated for their symptoms. If they were diagnosed, the diagnosis was hysteria, and they were immediately discharged from the war. Officials in France, Belgium, England, and the United States considered women of less value than combat soldiers and so made less effort to treat or retain them. In addition, when doctors thought about war trauma, they didn’t include interpersonal trauma that occurred outside of combat, such as sexual violence and the trauma of witnessing the effects of warfare. Yet women were exposed to just as much violence, if not more, than many men. Nurses had to care for horrific injuries and participate in surgeries, including amputations for men with gangrene. A Canadian military nurse, M. Lucas Rutherford, wrote that among all the conditions, shell shock was the most distressing and difficult to treat because the afflicted soldiers were often unreachable, unable to communicate.28”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“So even though the term “shell shock” was new, the war did not create many new symptoms. It did create a new framework in which to understand them as a pattern. Shell shock was caused not by the passions, as in women, but by physical experience. The diagnosis, historian Peter Lerner writes, “once a taboo, was not only acceptable by the middle of the war but was turned into a rallying cry, a patriotic crusade inflected with nationalistic and military language.”43 The diminishing concern about the feminine connotations of hysterical symptoms was especially pronounced in Germany, where Hermann Oppenheim said that with the term “shell shock” he could now talk about a soldier’s “nervous disturbances” without making him sound mentally diseased.44 In the United States, Thomas Salmon remarked on the tenacity with which war veterans “clung to a diagnosis of ‘shell shock.’ ”45 And with this common diagnosis came a message for the public at large: anyone, soldier or civilian, could get a neurosis, and to have one should in no way be dishonorable.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Once the category of shell shock was invalidated, and the symptoms stigmatized, shell-shock symptoms nearly disappeared. There was no benefit to expressing one’s emotional pain through the now-shameful disorder. Over time, new symptoms of war trauma replaced those of shell shock. The loss of speech, inability to walk, and contorted body postures, so frequent during WWI, would be relatively rare in WWII among combatants of every nation, and would mostly disappear by the mid-1950s.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“And whereas in WWI and WWII the symptoms of stress were apparent during or just after combat, and were treated using frontline clinical care (sometimes called “forward psychiatry”), combat stress during the brutal Vietnam War was rare.62 The spike in the prevalence of combat-related trauma among veterans of the Vietnam War only occurred well after the United States left Vietnam—hence the postwar development of the apt term “post-traumatic stress disorder.”63”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“some point in their lives receive a medical treatment that can be traced directly to the advances in medicine made during wartime. The whole field of psychological testing arguably derives from the screening of recruits in the world wars.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“patients, inasmuch as it is easily excited by every impression. The barking of dogs, an ill-tuned organ, or the scolding of women, are sufficient to distract patients of this description to such a degree, as almost approaches to the nature of delirium. It gives them vertigo, and headache, and often excites such a degree of anger as borders on insanity. When people are affected in this manner, which they very frequently are, they have a particular name for the state of their nerves, which is expressive enough of their feelings. They say they have the fidgets.”
― Mikka Nielsen, Experiences and Explanations of ADHD: An Ethnography of Adults Living with a Diagnosis

“She would never have qualified for a diagnosis of Asperger’s, the term that was associated with verbal skill and “high functioning” autism. But many people whom doctors characterize as “high functioning” have just as many, if not more severe, social impairments as people we might think of as “low functioning.” In addition, bright and verbal people with Asperger’s, who perhaps have undergraduate or graduate degrees, might expect—or their parents might expect—that they will find employment that demands far more social ability than they possess. In those cases, it’s difficult to set one’s sights lower. The same is true for the parents of so-called low functioning adults who set their sights higher.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“She was pretty, the kind of simple, inarguable pretty that I had never been. I was sexually attractive. Sometimes other women didn’t see it.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“Dogs want nothing of a man except all the things a man wants to give.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“I’m intrigued by the idiocy of trust.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“She’s at home, throwing out dead coffee filters from the morning. She’s too exhausted to cook and she doesn’t think for a moment her husband is in a crow pose at some slut’s apartment.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“I hate fighting. I’m sensitive and, frankly, not good at it. If the consequence of bickering online means I’ve got to spend the afternoon feeling bad because a kid I don’t remember from high school called me a “fat-ass Kelly Price” over a Reductress article, please murder me. And if my tweets get on your goddamn nerves: BLOCK ME FIRST. Kill me with your powerful brain! There are too many places in real life where blocking is not a viable option to tolerate someone ruining your secret lives online. You can’t block the coworker who won’t stop fucking talking while loitering nearby as you’re just trying to put half-and-half in your breakroom coffee, but you can block that friend of a friend who says shit like, “I’m not prejudiced, I don’t care if a person is purple or green or blue.” LMAO, blue people???? SHUT THE FUCK UP. You can’t delete the neighbor whose eyesore of a car is parked halfway across your driveway and whose cat keeps shitting on your deck, but you can delete your cousin who earnestly believes that rap music is reverse racism and vehemently comments as much on every Kendrick Lamar video you share. There’s no mute button for the woman at the grocery store who won’t stop asking you where the shampoo is, even though you’re pushing your”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“So here’s to love and loving your portable handheld telecommunication device. Stay inside where it’s temperature-controlled and there are no bugs and spend some time celebrating your beloved today. Make a delicious homemade casserole (look up the recipe on your phone), dip out to pick up a fancy bottle of wine (request a Lyft from your phone), sit next to a cozy fire (YouTube a fireplace video on your phone), sing along to your favorite jams (find it on Spotify on your phone), listen to your favorite book (open Audible on your phone), watch some cheesy movies (did you know you can get Netflix on your phone?!), send an update to the family members you haven’t seen in a while (use e-mail from your phone), order some Indian takeout (Grubhub dot com on your phone), text your homegirl some juicy gossip from your phone, and since you’re playing around on it anyway, why not do a little shopping on your phone? Is it holiday time? If so, maybe you could stop being a huge grinch for a change and just buy everyone in your circle the one thing we’ve been conditioned to constantly want: A NEW PHONE.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“In some ways, my moods did and did not exist. People said that you could will a mood into being or will it away. Just think positively. But I never felt that way. My moods were their own entities, even if no one could understand why they were there. That was what made me scared of feelings. I realized now what I had to do, in spite of what others said, was not try to change a mood but surrender to it. I had to surrender to whatever feelings arrived and in doing so I could maybe ride them, floating on the waves. I decided I was going to surrender.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces