An Abbreviated Life Quotes

“When you have an erratic, unpredictable, and aggressive parent, a child will detect signs and know when not to say something or know when to hide, so a threat-detecting sense begins to emerge early on. In the end, it wires the individual to be acutely aware and highly reactive to perceived threats.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life

“You try to blunt certain emotions, but your tool isn’t a scalpel, it’s a sledgehammer. And you’re blunting all of them. To protect yourself from feeling the horrible things, you prevent yourself from feeling some of the positive things.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life

“MY MOTHER MADE me doubt and question my perceptions. The loving and warm persona that followed the tirades confused and destabilized me. I wanted a witness. An ally. To verify. To have proof. Someone I could turn to and say, “This happened, didn’t it?” Someone who could see the transformation I saw. “I have a right to be angry, don’t I? I don’t trust her,” I say. Only I didn’t say this. Because I was seven years old and I didn’t know yet that’s how I felt. And not trusting one’s mother is, on a cellular level, unjust. I needed to be heard and kept hoping she would hear me. As a child, it was too overwhelming to believe that she couldn’t recognize reality. My craving for her to be different was powerful. It inoculated me against the tumult. I descended deep within myself, far away to a place in the future. Where things would make sense and right was right and wrong was wrong. I was able to crawl away from my rage. But I never crawled away far enough.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“I read about a little girl who had to navigate an unsafe world, a world without boundaries. This child was left alone most of the time—if not physically, emotionally. And then every once in a while, it would hit me that that child was me.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“MY ADULTHOOD HAS been about recuperating. There was no compulsion to give life to anyone else because I was depleted. There was nothing to give.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“THERE ARE STILL days I descend. On these days I am diving alone and no one can reach me. I am out of my depth. I pass twenty meters, pass thirty meters, rapturous with the descent and entering nitrogen narcosis. It’s called the Martini effect. But in this instance, the delirium is not a sensation of drunkenness but of nothingness. I descend with abandon, and there is no limit to how far I will go because the ocean I’m in is bottomless.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“What did the real damage was buried beneath the surface. Her denial that these incidents ever occurred and the accusation that I was looking to punish her with my unjustified anger. The erasure of the abuse was worse than the abuse.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“it was a traumatic time for him, but that’s as far as it goes. There is a blackout—emotional amnesia for any negative memory. It’s how he coped. The pain and the stress and the strain have been deleted. As if it didn’t occur. He remembers uncomplicated, joyful times; sunshine and white sand. The darkness of this memory is mine alone.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“What she missed out on and what I missed out on, too. I am grieving for someone who is still alive.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“BECAUSE HER LOVE was a vapor. It didn’t touch, it didn’t heal, it didn’t soothe.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“MCLEAN HOSPITAL IS known for its former residents who, with their distinguished madness, gave it a noted reputation. Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“And not trusting one’s mother is, on a cellular level, unjust.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“I would have liked to have known you when you were happy.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“I DID NOT hate my mother. I feared her. I feared her destroying my life. I feared her lies would turn others against me. I feared the incessant and unending conflict I would be forced to engage in with someone who couldn’t see past her own reality. To put myself first caused her to suffer. I feared the pain I would cause. I feared that pain would metastasize into vengeance. I feared her in the way I did as a child because I was powerless then to protect myself. There are days I am still that child.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“Home is not who I was. But the anxiety and detachment is with me no matter where I am. An immutable isolation is the scar tissue. The homelessness is in my bones. In the homelessness, I am at home.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“Every day is a struggle to fend off estrangement. The unsettled feeling is still there. An ominous sense that I will be disappointed, even though I work to keep it in check. It is an emotional tinnitus muted to a moderate decibel, and sometimes, without warning, it disappears entirely. And in this reprieve there are joyful moments.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“THE UNDERSTANDING OF abnormal could only be viewed as an adult, looking back. As a child, there was no barometer for normal other than not feeling under siege.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“to be separate was to be safe. The destructive beliefs were too entrenched in the landscape of my psyche, rooted in a soil that couldn’t be tilled. I believed what was missing would never regrow. Adult life would be recovery from the past. Stasis is all I could have.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“MY INTERIOR CLOCK was set to her mood. When her mood was stable, my life was better. I accommodated that. I believed I owed her. I believed that after everything she’d done for me, everything she’d given me, this entitled her to her due. But there were no limits to her entitlement, and for those in the path of it, there were only two options. Give in or pay a price. I gave in. I wanted a peaceful life and believed this was the only way to get it. These acts of betrayal were self-preservation. Or so I believed.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“I IMAGINE THAT if someone were to see this, they would think what a horrible daughter I must be. Heartless, as my mother says. Indecent. But disconnecting is something that is necessary or I will be devoured. It is her or me—and I choose me. There is no middle ground.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“The consequence of my childhood trauma is a bespoke suit of armor that can’t be discarded. Love is unreliable. Joy does not sustain. Good things will go away. I need certainty in an uncertain world, and the tyranny of the past dominates the present.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“TO COPE, IN childhood, was to be on guard at all times. Sentiment was not to be trusted. Hope would be met with disappointment. This was an operating system that allowed me to function, and it carried over into adulthood. The result was to live a life within brackets. An abbreviated life.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“When stress hormones are being released in a developing brain, the physical shape of it changes. These hormones mold the brain to overreact and overrespond. A permanent state of living on high alert. “But,” he adds, “what gets really complicated is that not everybody who gets exposed to something threatening activates and runs. Sometimes people freeze. Sometimes people shut down. Sometimes people dissociate.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“Now I want a quiet life. A home where I am not faced with circumstances that are out of my control. And conflict is not routine. When I need peace, I don’t want to have to explain why or bargain for it. I did that throughout my childhood. The need is not trivial. The roots are deep. I am compensating for what was absent. Seeking at the Lost and Found a missing childhood.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“WHAT I SAW was a diplomat. At seven years old I was strategizing. Understanding that asserting myself was not just useless but harmful. It didn’t matter if I was right or wrong, what mattered is that I didn’t make it worse. What mattered was making sure my mother was taken care of.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“MY SURVIVAL INSTINCTS come to the surface in other areas. Spotting the cracks so I know where I can tread. This is my reflex. There is no instruction booklet. Only I know how to fend her off, hold her back, back her down —and these impulses are automatic. Will it be a good day or a bad day? I am graceful at sidestepping perilous eventualities. I had no choice but to exist in the sea that she swam in. It was a fragile ecosystem where the temperature changed without warning. My natural shape was dissolved and I became shapeless. A plankton drifting in the current of her expectations. Unable to swim against it. And any attempt to swim away would harm her.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“Sometimes the invisible failures are not understood until it’s too late. And what prevails is the sense of unavoidable destiny. Standing in the pit of a crevasse, with a rope to safety just inches away and out of reach. If only I was half an inch taller. There is always that wish for the impossible. For the sick parent to recover, the impulsive parent to have self-control, the unpredictable parent to be consistent, the irrational parent to respond to logic; the profoundly disturbed parent not to be profoundly disturbed and to give unconditional love. MY ADULTHOOD HAS been about recuperating. There was no compulsion to give life to anyone else because I was depleted. There was nothing to give.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“I will be in the moment but detached from it, too. It is a strange and ethereal feeling. To slaughter the past while replenishing at the same time.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“I HAD NEVER envied colleagues who won awards or friends who purchased new things; and when I won awards or purchased new things, I felt a vague emptiness because it never seemed that it mattered. The material gains, the professional accomplishments—there was never a sense of this counts.”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir

“Passing pedestrians pay no attention to me. I am no one. Just another crying woman wandering in Manhattan”
― Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir