Girl in Need of a Tourniquet Quotes

“I can feel the sensation (it burns) of being called crazy when you feel wounded and desperate.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“It isn't any particular person I want to lie down with and make my own. It isn't anybody at all. It is the feeling of being taken care of that I want to pin down and rock my hips against. Sling a leg across it and fall asleep.

This longing for body comfort and security is familiar as my own face.

The need is urgent.

The need makes me stupid.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“I longed to stabilize my core identity and to withstand the pressure of other people's words, behaviors, moods, and perceptions. I wanted to be less easily thrown.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“I know insecurity is unattractive. I hate this side of me.

I don't really hate this side of me.

I think other people will hate it so I hate it preemptively to ward off the unbearable feeling of having my shortcomings pointed out by other people. I want to get there before anyone else and stake my claim on hating my jealousy so no one else can.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“My life story is structured by reckless reenactments of panic and flight.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“I thieve love. I beg for it. People want what they cannot have.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“I worked through memories like weeping wounds. I wrote tedious accounts of petty conflicts and read them aloud to people. I removed layer after layer of rot.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“I have spoken in tongues of fire. I have torn whole towns in two for love. I have courted insanity, crouching in the gap between what this moment feels like (smoldering fire fanned into the most logical flames) and how it looks to other people (the psychotic break of spontaneous combustion). I can feel the sensation of being called CRAZY when you feel WOUNDED and DESPERATE.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“I wade through the rush of neglect and loss and sadness pouring through a hole in my hull.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“THE AFFECTIVE
SHIFTS IN BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER, UNLIKE
BIPOLAR II, OSCILLATE BETWEEN ANGER AND DYSPHORIA
RATHER THAN FROM DEPRESSION TO ELATION AND
TEND TO BE REACTIVE TO INTERPERSONAL CONTEXT
RATHER THAN ENDOGENOUSLY DRIVEN.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“Borderline personality disorder is a form of madness made of mood disorders and neurological malfunctions. People with borderline personality heat up fast and have trouble cooling back down. Emotions run high. Impulse and inhibition run together like hot and cold water from a tap. Once the borderline body reaches this place of hypervigilance and despair, every day presents new evidence of apocalypse and new opportunities for hysteria and resignation.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“LEVELS OF EMOTIONAL FUNCTIONING IN BORDERLINE PERSONALITY 1. Depressed, bored, and lonely 2. Angry, controlling, paranoid, and manipulative behaviors in response to anticipated loss of attachment 3. Nihilistic dissociation and raging fights, often fueled by the disinhibiting effects of alcohol or substance abuse —JOHN GUNDERSON, Borderline Personality Disorder: A Clinical Guide”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“I know I’m not okay. I am nose to nose with a fire and it’s too hot. I want to fix the fire—as if the fire itself were uncomfortable, as if the discomfort I feel were not my own.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“In one of the few memoirs of self-injury, Caroline Kettlewell describes her recovery in terms of neural pathways—the “groove” worn into her mind, the “wrong turns and dark corridors” marked by her history of cutting. Once she learns how to stand “the awful agony of unhappiness” without reverting to the bodily jolt of broken skin, she changes the map of psychological struggle in her mind. “[E]very time I gut it through and survive,” she concludes, “I’m reshaping the structure and the chemistry of my thoughts, wearing new paths less tortured and convoluted than the old ones.”   Cutting”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“Our bodies made us shiver in fear and disgust. We looked in the mirror and prepared ourselves to be horrified.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“I bored myself to tears with the daytime television drama of confrontation (I've been wronged!). I winced at sluggish morning half-memories of wearing wrongness like a lampshade on my head (I'm mentally ill!).”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“You are driving me crazy,” I wail. “Why don’t you care?” The last word—CARE—loses elasticity and flattens into another long wail. I am knees on the floor, shoulders on the floor, forehead on the floor. It is the fetal position. I get caught in a loop of feelings. I get louder and louder. I am groping about for the concept of NEGLECT. She is neglecting me. But I can’t find the words. I can’t catch my breath.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“Searching out a painful image, going over it and over it in my mind, raking its sharp edges over my open psychological sores. My mind generates the million and one questions I ask in order to avoid asking the only one that matters. Can you save me? At the time I believe my thoughts are real.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“It’s not true but I long to be connected like that. I want someone to be able to tell I am out of sorts by the details of my distraction, like leaving the drawers of my dresser cracked open. I want someone to know me as well as”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“The normal guardrails of healthy emotional boundaries were never constructed inside me. I think it’s normal that I feel what Emily feels. Better than normal: I believe tuning into other people’s emotions is my secret superpower. I can bend steel with my bare hands. I can find a way in. I am CAPTAIN EMPATHY—able to intuit feelings like Superman leaps tall buildings.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“Jealousy itself would be gauche. Jealousy is so yesterday. I want to be so TODAY I’m already TOMORROW. I want to be bigger than my jealousy. I want to be above it. I know insecurity is unattractive. I hate this side of me. I don’t really hate this side of me. I think other people will hate it so I hate it preemptively to ward off the unbearable feeling of having my shortcomings pointed out by other people. I want to get there before anyone else and stake my claim on hating my jealousy so no one else can. Emily says jealousy is a perfectly normal feeling. She lets me off the hook just like that.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“in the work of R. D. Laing, who questioned the social construction of mental illness: “Setting the sick apart sustains the fantasy that we are whole.” The”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

“I want to say my apartment is no paradise for bachelorettes and would be more accurately described by terms like 'pain clinic', 'wound-care center', or 'half way house' for the chronically triggered, the emotionally dysregulated, the bright but broken-hearted, and a few repeat offenders of adulterous behavior.”
― Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality