In The Blood

What does it mean to forgive someone? It only means that you release the anger, the hatred. It doesn't mean that you’re saying it’s all right now, or that you've forgotten the wrong. It just means that you've drained the boil. When you touch it, it doesn't hurt as much. That's all.

I think we draw people into our lives. It’s as though we broadcast our deepest needs, and certain people hear the signal somewhere in their own subconscious and heed the call. For better or worse, we attract our teachers, our allies, and sometimes even our nightmares. Some of us have louder signals.

We have more patience for girls who act like boys than boys who act like girls. A tomboy is considered cute. One day she’ll shuck her muddy jeans and put on a dress, and everyone will gasp at her beauty. They’ll all laugh about her tree-climbing, frog-catching days. But there’s no such tolerance for the boy who puts on a dress, who wants a toy kitchen or a baby doll to love. Jung would say that this is because, even culturally, our anima is repressed, hated, derided. We hate our female selves. A boyish girl is perfectly acceptable. A girlish boy? Not so much. In certain places, you’d get your ass kicked, find yourself "gay-bashed." You might even get yourself killed. That's how much we hate our anima.

But did you know that eyewitness testimony is often totally unreliable? The human memory only records events through the filter of its own frame of reference. We try to fit the information we receive into schemas, units of knowledge that we possess about the world that correspond with frequently encountered situations, individuals, ideas, and situations. In other words, we often see things as we expect to see them, or want to see them, and not always as they are.

They don’t find peace. It’s pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don’t deserve to walk among the living, and you know it.

Every couple starts off loving each other, don't they? It's how a relationship ends that really defines its nature.

Is the prey complicit in its own demise? Are we not seduced in some small way by the beauty, the grace, even the dangerous soul of the predator?

What we think of as our “gut instincts” are really a very complex mosaic of past experiences, deep-seated hopes, fears, desires.

But that’s the thing about mental illness; there’s no such thing as a cookie-cutter diagnosis. We’re all crazy in our own special way. Some of us just have it worse than others.

You can put on a mask and a costume for the rest of the world, but you can't hide from the people who changed your diapers.

Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can break your heart.

I should have been sending up flares, instead I was offering smiles.

When you hate women, you hate all the female elements of your own psychology. Jung believed that there were two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. The animus is the unconscious male, and the anima is the unconscious female. Because a man’s anima, his more sensitive, feeling side, must so often be repressed, it forms the ultimate shadow self—a dark side that is hated and buried. Jung was a big believer in accepting the shadow, embracing it . . . or suffering the consequences in psychic pain.

As parents, we must accept that our children are who they are. We can’t make them into something we want, or be disappointed in them because they don’t meet our artificial expectations.

when we put on clothes, we’re telling ourselves something, and we’re communicating that something to every person we meet.

Dysfunction isn’t a choice, it’s a disease.

Honestly, it’s the most you can ask of men sometimes. They’re so wound up, so buried beneath layers of “boys don’t cry,” and “pussy,” and “man up,” that they don’t even know how to feel about anything. I should know.

We hate our parents for having their own lives, don’t we, for making decisions for themselves that don’t seem to take us into account. They’re not people, not really. They’re parents; how dare they live and love and die without us?

In that moment,feeling my isolation in a way I never had before, I thought about calling her. But I didn't want to hear the fear and disappointment in her voice. I didn't want to to deal with her expectations of me. Maybe that's why we choose to isolate ourselves, those of us who do. Because in so many ways, it's just easier.

When someone we love dies suddenly and tragically, it’s like seeing the curvature of the earth. You always knew it was round, a contained sphere floating in space. But when you see the bend in the horizon line, it changes your perspective on everything else.

The human mind, with all its mystery, bears endless study. Doesn’t it?

We count so much on politeness, those of us who are hiding things. We count on people not staring too long, or asking too many questions.

I think we draw people into our lives...It's as though we broadcast our deepest needs...For better or worse, we attract our teachers, our allies, and sometimes even our own nightmares.

It was human nature to see only what you want to see, and nothing would change that, no matter what tools people had at their disposal. The truth is only what you think it is.

Somehow I escaped punishment in that life, and so now, lifetimes later, a very special kind of hell is being rained down on me, the full rage of karmic justice.

The choices we made ... These were the right choices. They were positive and proactive. And it was, for a time, good for everyone, most especially our boy. But were these choices really? Or were they reactions? Reactions to something that life had thrown at us, something we didn't choose and didn't want. Is there a difference between reaction and choice? I don't know the answer.

But then again, we're all on death row, aren't we? Most of us just don't know it.

I have started taking the pills and I pray that everyone is right, that I have been sabotaged by my own brain chemicals. And that the little blue pill is going to put things right again.

...I love the way Beck loves. If everyone loved like she did, the world would be a better place.