The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: A Memoir

Sometimes bad things are just senseless brutality that finds you. You do not deserve or ask for these things. They are not always teaching you a lesson.

Looking back at my childhood, I slowly understood that even if no one talked about it, these secrets had been a distress signal that buzzed all through it, a frequency that's too low to hear, but you can still feel pulsing through the air, shaping you--with its invisible currents and dial tones--into the person you become.

I don't care what people say about hate, it kept me alive.

if something doesn’t stir anything but contempt in you, there’s a reason. Trust your contempt. Dissect it if you can. The reason your contempt is tapping you on the shoulder may be in there, and be valid, or it may not. If you can’t find it, it’s OK.

Forgiveness seems to be a sweet, brief rest at the crossroads of other things. It’s almost a divine by-product. It’s not a tiny golden diploma you bestow upon someone. Forgiveness takes many forms and may be as simple as the moment something no longer has power over you.

The rule makers don't want us to know each other in real life, they want us to know "of" each other only, and fearfully at that; you'll see it on the nightly news in every region. Meeting, in person, as many people as possible is what smashes the illusion that we have no connection with "us" beyond some racist anthems and the pledge of allegiance.

This was how the world could be when someone really loved you.

I look just like her, which makes me wish I looked like anyone else.

I experienced myself as so unlovable, and yet around me were these encouraging examples of love and affection—it was at once shattering, heartbreaking, and exhilarating.

People often ask me how I write songs. Honestly, there’s no one method, so I couldn’t walk you through it even if we had all the time in the world. Sometimes lyrics come first, sometimes music. Some songs take thirty minutes to write, others take years. Some are grim chores and others feel like they just fell out of the pocket of a coat I haven’t worn in a while, like a slumbering twenty-dollar bill. I can tell you what it feels like in the songs, though. Songs are part homemade diorama, part gerbil maze, and part eighties music video—location, story arc, and cinematic container. You build all the tiny props inside so lovingly and sometimes they just aren’t to scale, so you have to start over, and it’s crushing. There are tantrums, tears.

Fear is funny; it sometimes seems more possible to continue doing time in the lonely jail you know rather than rising above it to connect with others.

I grew up believing I was nothing, and sometimes my own insignificance wracked me with pain. But luckily, somewhere down the line, I came to realize that if I'm nothing, and have nothing, what's the real risk of putting myself out there?

Sometimes you can even detect a trace of the women; it's been a long time since Christianity sunk its teeth in and shook hard, trying to break the necks of our spirits. So much of the feminine has been washed away, but the old witch Baba Yaga is still in there.

As the soft rebellion gains speed, I feel my whole being stuffed up inside my mouth. I wonder, oh so fleetingly, how I got here. It’s a forbidden question; the mere thinking of it could open a trapdoor beneath my feet, and if I don’t wipe it away quick enough I’ll fall through. It’s a rabbit-hole vacuum and I swat the question from my mind. But it’s too late. I see a kid running down the grayest street possible. At first she looks gray, too. But then I see the embers of rage flying off her. She has rivulets of fur trickling out of her sleeves and down the back of her neck, a stray’s three-beat gait. She is not even a she at all, just an animal running, as hard as it can, panting, out of breath.

I had looked into the eyes of those wounds on my mother's hip bones for her; it was the worst thing I'd ever seen, and I would have done it a million times more because that's how much I loved her. I would kill the man who did these things to her and live in jail forever. How did she not know? How had I failed so utterly?

I also have acute high-end hearing, so things bother me that other people can't hear. For example, I can hear electricity. Most people can't. I had no idea, I just thought everybody could.