What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us Quotes

“In one of the notebooks he carried with him, Nietzsche wrote, "We have art lest we perish from the truth." For those leading afterlives, the unadorned facts of what's happened to them can be brutish to bear on their own terms. Contextualizing that hardship through our intellects and imaginations is a critical salve, an act of transforming our perception that can guide and color how we experience our lives. We can knead our experiences into a larger arc, providing the cohesion that helps us form new narrative identities. Or we can look deeper into our afterlives until we ferret out a way of construing them that rouses our spirits or points them toward salvation. In her essay collection The White Album, Joan Didion delivered a pronouncement that was a natural descendants to Nietzsche's line, an admission of how desperately we rely on the subjective fictions we construct: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Those stories--whether they take the form of redemption narratives, personal parables, or the pearlescent beliefs we kneel before each day like shrines offering eternal grace--can elevate our lives and serve as the vessels of private deliverance.”
― Mike Mariani, What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us: Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma

“In Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon writes, "It takes an act of will to grow from loss: the disruption provides the opportunity for growth, not the growth itself." Catastrophes do not trigger transformation; they only establish the conditions that increase the likelihood that we will pursue them. Only through our willful, persevering actions can we gradually remake our identities.”
― Mike Mariani, What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us: Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma

“The Lebanese American poet Kahlil Gibran wrote, "The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." The catastrophes that carve themselves deep inside of us also leave us with increased depth, augmenting the volume of feeling we're able to hold. And how can we measure devotion but by how much the vessels that we become for our art, faith, saviors, and crusades have the capacity to contain?”
― Mike Mariani, What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us: Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma

“Examining our behaviors and thought patterns demands sustained, uninterrupted self-work, and the fullness of our everyday lives and the finite attention spans that rove through them sometimes appear engineered to thwart personal investigations. For many, such an undertaking is undesirable in any case: Those of us content with our lives are not compelled to confront or interrogate our habits, lifestyles, or underlying beliefs. Contentment doesn't incentivize change--it does everything in its power to forestall it. But those of us learning to survive in the ill-disposed, unaccommodating terrain of afterlives--marooned on the desert islands we have little affinity for--must open ourselves up to it.”
― Mike Mariani, What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us: Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma

“The identities people foster in their afterlives are rarely arrived at incidentally--they do not wander haphazardly into their passions, careers, perspectives, and beliefs. The individuals they become are forged in voids, sowed on fallow land, pursued against the finest of margins, and people seize on them because their survival in some sense depends on it.”
― Mike Mariani, What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us: Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma