Avi

“Instead, I cemented my role in relationships as a pleaser, a convincer, a girl who, well into adulthood, would contort and conform to the desires of a man, overlooking his easy dismissal, and dampening her self-worth, all to be loved.”
― Anna Marie Tendler, Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

“The psychologist Resmaa Menakem writes about the embodiment of experience passed down to us, how some memories are handed down not in the form of words but through our skin and our nervous system in ways that bypass language.”
― Sarah LaBrie, No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir – A New York Times Notable Book of Intergenerational Trauma, Race, and Understanding

“Here is the thing about men lying to women while telling them they are crazy or overreacting. The lying, the underplaying on their side, makes us doubt our intuition and intelligence, so eventually when suspicions are confirmed, when we find out we have been correct all along, we do go batshit fucking crazy. And it is warranted.”
― Anna Marie Tendler, Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

“Women with consumption during the nineteenth century were thought to be the epitome of beauty. They are described in books and depicted in paintings as being luminescent with their milk-white skin and red lips. This is how men saw them, anyway. The perfect woman—impossibly pale, impossibly thin, lips tinted red (from coughing up blood), too tired to speak, too weak to move. All she can do is sit and stare out the window, incandescent as life leaves her body. A woman was thought by many to have contracted consumption due to some moral failing, so while her beauty was fetishized, her character was denigrated. Fucking men.”
― Anna Marie Tendler, Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir