Michelle Payne Quotes

Painful events leave scars, true, but it turns out they're largely erasable. Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroanatomist who had a stroke that obliterated her memory, described the event as losing '37 years of emotional baggage.'

I damaged all the complicated bits of the brain to do with processing and emotional control. I was prey to every single emotion that swept over me and I couldn't deal with it. I had to re-learn things from scratch.

I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.

Grateful people may recover faster from trauma.

Any child soldier has to go through a lot of love, care and understanding to become normal.

Part of the healing process is sharing with other people who care.

I think I ran so hard and so fast, in a lot of ways, from my life and I kind of took a fall. It was like - what do they call it? - post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I'd gone through the ups and downs and curveballs that life throws at you. I found writing to be very therapeutic and it helped me with a lot of the stuff I was going through.

Being able to sing all these years has helped me handle life's tragedies.

In my experience, divorce takes you out for about 10 years, but you hear people talk about it lightly. The same with depression. You only have to have one good breakdown before you realize you need help. It's pretty frightening.

At Lackland Air Force Base, they make an effort to retrain military dogs that suffer from PTSD. It's a lengthy, long process. The treatment is much the same as it would be for people, but it's a difficult road back.

Divorce is brutal and horrible and... you have to actively work to get your life back on track.

The degree that these scenes went to... there was a couple of days I was upset... I'd have to hurry back to the girls in the makeup trailer and have a bit of a cry because it messes with your head.

Post-traumatic stress disorder didn't surface as a condition until 1980... that fact was very relevant when I remember back to how these men behaved. A lot of walking on eggshells was required for wives and children.

Kurt had this dumb suicidal ideation - that's what I called it. I thought if we could live through this, we could live through anything.

It seems to me that unless you or someone very close to you has had a bad head injury, you really can't fathom it. You have no concept of what it is all about. It was so difficult for my whole family, not just me.

I think people who suffer from depression, unless it's post-traumatic, are probably going to struggle with it for their whole life.

For somebody who has injured their brain, every single thing they say and think will be the subject of their own questioning.

Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.

I learned a lot about a traumatic situation and what it does to you. It really brings you closer to your family and your loved ones.

I think each veteran's soul has something that it needs to say. I know from my own personal traumas, it's very hard to know what that is. But when I'm watching someone else struggle, it's not as confusing for me, 'cause it's not my struggle, so I can help identify that.

When we're suffering, we kind of have this notion that we kind of should stop living and we should just focus on his how to 'get over it,' how to just 'get to the other side.'

Music saved me from a really dark road.

People are fragile. Our brains are fragile and you can only abuse them for so long.

I do a lot of book signings and conventions every year, and I meet a great many readers who are struggling... they're working through illness, injury, addiction, depression, grief, or some other trauma. It seems to me that there's a lot of heroism in fighting those things as well, as best you can.