Madi > Recent Status Updates

3/3

But no one understood the black lines under my eyes either. I could have trademarked those lines--they were as much a part of my look as David Bowie's lightning bolt was part of his. People called them war paint. But not one person I met in the eighties ever thought to connect them to football.

2/3
And I don't think they would have. It was something I'd carried from way, way back. Something that meant so much to me then that I was going to carry it with me for the rest of my life. It was a loyalty thing.

1/3
Carl was a defensive end. Alan played defensive tackle. Together, they taught me to play chess. They had all the patience in the world for me, and I've always been grateful. Whenever my band played in Minneapolis, I'd get a Minnesota Vikings jersey and put it on for the encore.

I used to get razzed for it. People would say, "We don't even like the Vikings here in Minnesota!"
I'd go, "You'll never understand."

1/2
Carl was a defensive end. Alan played defensive tackle. Together, they taught me to play chess. They had all the patience in the world for me, and I've always been grateful. Whenever my band played in Minneapolis, I'd get a Minnesota Vikings jersey and put it on for the encore.

I used to get razzed for it. People would say, "We don't even like the Vikings here in Minnesota!"
I'd go, "You'll never understand."

PERFECT
I love you just the way you are
but you don't see you like I do.
You shouldn't try so hard to be perfect.
Trust me, perfect should try to be you.

You know the moral of that story […]? Some guys - a lot of guys - don't believe what they are seeing, especially if it gets in the way of what they want to eat or drink or think or believe.
Me, I don't believe in God. But if I saw him, I would. I wouldn't just go around saying, "Jesus, that was a great special effect.
The definition of an asshole is a guy who
doesn't believe what he's seeing. And you can quote me."

Misery loves company, and I guess we’ve all got a streak of one hundred percent gold-plated bastard in our natures, tangled up so tightly with the good part of us that we can never get free of it.

“He got up, went outside, and found the New York Times in the flowerbed. The kid always threw it in the flowerbed, never had his numbers right at the end of the week, could never remember Bill's last name. Billy had wondered on more than one occasion if it was possible for a twelve-year-old kid to become a victim of Alzheimer's disease.”

"He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her."

Life is like a book, son. And every book has an end. No matter how much you like that book...you will get to the last page...and it will end.

No book is complete without its end. And once you get there...only when you read the last words...will you see how good the book is. It feels real.

Sharks

You're afraid of sharks?
Really?
They don't even have bones!
They have cartilage.
Are you afraid of ears too?

This Hour

I need to make this hour last,
so attach a beach to the top of my hourglass.

" He lives on his nerve endings, and when people do that, their minds can turn against them. "

“ Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so- pardon the pun -so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist." “

My first time reading this book, I've just started chapter 3 - was looking for some quick morning reading to clear my head, and WOW it's been a while since I read any Stephen King, especially this gruesome - the accident that opens this chapter left my jaw on the floor! But, silly me, I love it.

"But writing is a wonderful and terrible thing. It opens deep wells of memory that were previously capped."

Remember, Mia had said: Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too.
They start over. They find a way.

With Mia she'd been different, in a way she hadn't known she could be: in Mia's accepting presence she'd become curious and kind and open, as if under a magic spell. She had felt, finally, as if she could speak without immediately bumping into the hard shell of her sheltered life, as if she suddenly saw that the solid walls penning her in were actually bars, with spaces between them wide enough to slip through.

He felt as if he'd dived into a deep, clear lake and discovered it was a shallow, knee-deep pond. What did you do? Well, you stood up. You rinsed your mud-caked knees and pulled your feet out of the muck.
And you were more cautious after that. You knew, from
then on, that the world was a smaller place than vou'd
expected.

The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training ourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.

"The only action that has vaster repercussions for the universe than making a life is TAKING one...which is why I'll never understand why most people put so little foresight into doing either."

"All wise people know that no one knows everything. If you feel you don't need to read this book because you're already a decent white person, there's a good chance you're not as decent as you think."

“In fact, Tim (son of Eunice Kennedy Shriver) believes that Rosemary belonged at the centre of the Kennedy family story, because it was she, through her self-determination and the struggles that she faced, who had transformed them all.”

At the Trauma Center, we have developed programs to coach parents in connection and attunement, and my patients have told me about many other ways to get themselves in synch, ranging from choral singing and ballroom dancing to joining basketball teams, jazz bands and chamber music groups. All of these foster a sense of attunement and communal pleasure.

To have genuine relationships you have to be able to experience others as separate individuals, each with his or her particular motivations and intentions. While you need to be able to stand up for yourself, you also need to recognize that other people have their own agendas. Trauma can make all that hazy and gray.

Over the years our research team has repeatedly found that chronic emotional abuse and neglect can be just as devastating as physical abuse and sexual molestation. [...] Not being seen, not being known, and having nowhere to turn to feel safe is devastating at any age, but it is particularly destructive for young children, who are still trying to find their place in the world.

Isolating oneself into a narrowly defined victim group promotes a view of others as irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst, which eventually only leads to further alienation. Gangs, extremist political parties, and religious cults may provide solace, but they rarely foster the mental flexibility needed to be fully open to what life has to offer and as such cannot liberate their members form their traumas.

If we look beyond the list of specific symptoms that entail formal psychiatric diagnoses, we find that almost all mental suffering involves either trouble in creating workable and satisfying relationships or difficulties in regulating arousal (as in the case of habitually becoming enraged, shut down, overexcited, or disorganized).

The Polyvagal Theory provided us with a more sophisticated understanding of the biology of safety and danger[..]. It explained why a face or a soothing tone of voice can dramatically alter the way we feel. It clarified why knowing that we are seen and heard by the important people in our lives can make us feel calm and safe, and why being ignored or dismissed can precipitate rage reactions or mental collapse.

Effectively dealing with stress depends upon achieving a balance between the smoke detector [amygdala] and the watchtower [MPFC - medial prefrontal cortex]. If you want to manage your emotions better, your brain gives you two options: You can learn to regulate them from the top down [MPFC] or from the bottom up [amygdala].