Show Me All Your Scars Quotes

“Early spring. Hyacinths on my desk. Intoxicating, sweet, fresh, alive—the sticky, cloying scent of a novice’s hope. Hope for light, for warmth, for thawing soil.”
― Beth Wiles, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“Regret is my compass. I am an alchemist, trained in the transmutation of my nervous system. I have installed trained guides beside me. I am saving at least one life."
"I keep writing. I must. Over and over and over. The same story a million ways.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“Carl Jung: “Life is an experiment in consciousness that most people fail.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“I am learning how to let my yes be yes and my no mean no without the need to justify why I choose to say either.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“Medication cannot cure you of depression. Like a seatbelt, it can save your life—but a seatbelt never brought joy to anyone’s heart. A seatbelt never put a skip in a step.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“Although victims do not always become perpetrators, a truism repeated by prosecutors at sentencing, as if it were a profound revelation never before put into words, it is the rare serious perpetrator who was not also a victim. . . . It is the rare death row inmate whose life does not read like a case study of extreme deprivation and abuse. It is the rare juvenile incarcerated in an adult prison for rape or murder who has had anything other than the cruelest of childhoods.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“I’ve learned that even people with mental illness have stigmas about mental illness.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“Genetics or brain chemistry, trauma or karma? It doesn’t really matter what it’s called—after all, no one really knows for sure what causes this affliction—except that it ends. Can I stop doing this? Am I even able? The bees trapped inside my body buzz and whir, needling my nerve endings with delicate stings.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“It was my biggest fear to go crazy like my mom. I worried about waking up one day and no longer understanding reality in quite the same way, being lost in the black hole of madness.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“Self-injury forces us to look pain in the face, to see physical evidence of conditions that are usually personal and private. Mental illness is a difficult, confounding subject, one many of us would rather ignore. Self-injury draws our attention to something we don’t want to see, and perhaps this is why it makes so many people so uncomfortable.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“almost all people who hurt themselves on purpose do so at least in part to regulate their emotions.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“Take care. For yourself, for those you have carried, for the universe, for your deer, for your heart, for your angels, for those you love. There has never been a more selfless selfish act. Take care.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“. Most mental health problems don’t look like we expect. People with crushing depression still laugh and clap their hands. People with bipolar depression still go to work, order coffee at Starbucks, tread in dog shit, get married.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness