patry 🇵🇸🇨🇩🇸&#x1f’s Reviews > Acts of Desperation > Status Update

“I thought how full my life and my head had been for ever with these things, with the desperation to be loved by a man, with the idea that a man’s adoration or need to fuck me would make all the bad parts of myself be quiet for ever."

“I remembered how much I had once loved to learn things. I could see myself back in the library in Waterford surrounded by reference books and encyclopedias, where I would sit all day, learning things because I wanted to know them, not to tell them to anybody else or to become someone different than I really was.”

“Once you’ve said no, a man wheedling feels unbearable. Even if he does it politely, or gently, it overrides the clearly expressed intention. It says: Your choice does not really matter. What I desire matters, and I don’t want to feel bad for forcing you into it. So perhaps you ought to reconsider?”

“It was already so near to impossible to say no to a man, so difficult to accept the possibility of being hurt or disliked or shouted at. It takes so much out of you to make yourself say no when you have been taught to say yes, to be accommodating, to make men happy.”

“That night Mark kissed me and I let him. It was the easy thing to do, the only thing to do. The idea of telling him not to and the ensuing conversation filled me with weariness. I wondered how many times in my life I had made this calculation, how the men would feel if they knew, if they would care.”

“I hate my weakness, what I severed of myself and gave to him, but love it too, love it still. I do not take it back. I love the girl who did those things. I love the girl because I feel sorry for her, and understand her.”

“I hate now for men to dote in this way, the ones who don’t know me. Their praise lands uncertainly in the air somewhere between the two of us, because it doesn’t belong to me. I hate to hear them tell me what I am, even or especially when what they think I am is kind or brilliant or beautiful.”

“I had suffered, and I had made the suffering into something I could consider good. I made it so that suffering was a kind of work.”

“These stories hurt me so badly, but I’ve learned to react to that hurt by thinking of them again and again, forcing myself to replay the details over and over and over, until they are meaningless.
You grow cold, or you die yourself.”

“You have to hope that he died before realising how alone he really was. You have to hope that he died still thinking that somebody loved him in the way he had wanted to be loved.”