Andrew > Andrew's Quotes

“The covertly depressed person cannot merely vault over the avoided pain directly into wholeness, as hard as he may try. The only real cure for covert depression is overt depression. Not until the man has stopped running, as David did for a moment that day in my office, or Thomas did when he let himself cry, can he grapple with the pain that has driven his behavior. This is why the “fix” of the compulsive defense never quite works. First, the covertly depressed man must walk through the fire from which he has run. He must allow the pain to surface. Then, he may resolve his hidden depression by learning about self-care and healthy esteem.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Those who do not turn to face their pain are prone to impose it.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“I do not blame myself for running from those feelings. No one would deliberately subject himself to the discomfort I carried inside my skin unless he had a very good reason to. As a little boy fleeing into the streets and waiting neighborhood games, as an adolescent fleeing toward drugs that soothed me like a mother, I have taken flight throughout most of my life. Hurt, grandiose, blaming others for not filling me up, I was in search of the next big fix, in search of love without having the skills to love well in return. Like Perceval, I have spent a good portion of my life wandering, searching for the right question.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Instead of the capacity to experience himself from the inside out, he seeks a desperate union with an external source of abundance, which he thinks will complete him. The price of his delusion is death. Unable to eat or sleep, like a severe addict in the final stages of obsession he wastes. With no capacity to speak her own words, Echo records and reiterates Narcissus's every sigh. If he is a reflection, she is the reflection of his reflection, the shadow of his shadow. Narcissus loses sensation, and the result is fatal paralysis. Echo loses her voice, and the result is also paralysis. Neither is capable of authentic relationship.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Depression freezes, but sadness flows. It has an end. The thing I had spent so much time avoiding had just swept through me-- and I was fine.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Treating covert depression is like peeling back the layers of an onion. Underneath the covertly depressed man's addictive defenses lies the pain of a faulty relationship to himself. And at the core of this self-disorder lies the unresolved pain of childhood trauma.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“If overtly depressed men are paralyzed, men who are covertly depressed, as I was, cannot stand still. They run, desperately trying to outdistance shame by medicating their pain, pumping up their tenuous self-esteem, or, if all else fails, inflicting their torture on others. Overt depression is violence endured. Covert depression is violence deflected. In either case, understanding depression in men means coming to grips with men's violence. How has the door of the psyche been opened to such a dark visitation? By what mechanisms does violence in the boy's environment become internalized as a stable force inside his own mind?”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“I have often thought about the high school boys my father saw drown and the advice he gave me: "Don't touch them. They'll drag you under." As in so many other instances, his advice on this matter was wrong. I did not go down into that dark vortex with my father. But neither did I let go of his embrace.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of our selves–wherever we go.
Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.
Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence.
I still carry these versions of myself. It's a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“In all these places, I loved that person. I loved him. Where does that go? The love is in all of these places—haunting?—and in none of them. The love is everywhere and nowhere.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“What would I have done to save my marriage? I would have abandoned myself, and I did, for a time. I would have done it for longer if he’d let me.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“I’m trying to tell you the truth, so let me be clear: I didn’t want this lemonade. My kids didn’t want this lemonade. This lemonade was not worth the lemons. And yet, the lemons were mine. I had to make something from them, so I did. I wrote. I’ll drink to that.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“We can endure anything if we know when it will end, but I had no idea when it would end.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Marriages are nesting dolls, too. We carry each iteration: the marriage we had before the children, the marriage of love letters and late nights at dive bars and train rides through France; the marriage we had after the children, the marriage of tenderness but transactional communication—who’s doing what, and when, and how—and early mornings and stroller walks and crayon on the walls and sunscreen that always needs to be reapplied; the marriage we had toward the end before we knew there was an end, the marriage of the silent treatment and couch sleeping and the occasional update email. Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there, but we’d have to open and open and open ourselves—our together selves—to find it. I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Maybe I shouldn’t have accepted any of them, but I was trying to keep the peace. Now I think, What peace?”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“My mother loved you as her own son and you broke her heart.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“How I picture it: I am a half-double now -- half a couple, half a whole.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“I feel like I need to reiterate something: This isn't the story of a good wife and a bad husband. Was I easy to live with? Probably not. I craved time to myself. I thought I knew best what the children needed. I was stubborn. I disliked -- dislike -- confrontation, so I could be -- can be -- avoidant or passive-aggressive. If you hurt my feelings, I might have carried that pain quietly, but the quiet was loud. I had postpartum depression twice, and I miscarried twice, and I suffered, and that suffering was loud.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“If you feel that someone is being unkind or unfair to you, you don't want to be close to them. Then you aren't close to them, so you grow further apart. More unkindness, more distance. It's a vicious cycle, and breaking it requires deep work.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“I didn't feel missed as a person, I felt missed as staff. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house. I was needed back in my post.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Was this my proudest moment? No. I was not my best self that night. I gave all the fucks, I thought. Why was I the one giving all the fucks? Where were his fucks?”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“I kept silent in order to hold it.
I taught myself to read his face and dim mine, a good mirror.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“It was completely illogical: as if part of me wanted him back, and part of me wanted him to disappear, and nothing in between would do. Or: I wanted my husband back, and I wanted the stranger he'd become to disappear.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It's still there, but we'd have to open and open and open ourselves -- our together selves -- to find it.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“In one, my husband wrapped his arms around me, and I buried my face in his neck. I breathed him in. He smelled like himself in the waking world. Everything was just as it was -- the slightest sandpaper of stubble on his throat -- except not at all. There was no strain, no anger, only tenderness. Then I woke up.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“But health is health, and the end of my marriage had been bad for mine. I cried (and cried and cried and cried). I woke up in the middle of the night terrified, my heart racing. I whittled myself down, losing more than twenty pounds. I was thinner than I'd been in high school. I never harmed myself, never planned to, but the darkest moments made me want to disappear. To cut a hole in the air and climb inside. To play a magic trick on my suffering, a sleight of hand.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful