Aleksa Palladino Quotes

I don't like feeling vulnerable. I think my mum and dad's divorce affected me more than I let on.

I've been hiding crucial events in my life since I was 13.

I lost boundaries as a child that I didn't even realize it and it wasn't talked about back then. You know, it was something you just buried and dealt with, and moved forward. What could you do about it?

Because my dad was often gone, I never wanted to do anything that would make him stay away even longer. I became extra careful about what I said and how I said it, afraid he'd think I was angry or didn't love him. And the truth is, I was angry. I missed him and wanted him there.

I was always the one asking everybody else if they were O.K. I never talked about my problems. I didn't want to admit I had problems. I just let 'em build up. I didn't want anybody to know I was hurtin'.

Growing up, I never expressed myself to nobody. I never told nobody when something was wrong.

Even with me, there are so many things I have bottled up.

I was told not to cry as a kid.

I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out of reach. And by telling myself that there was nothing inside those hopes anyway, I avoided the wounds of deep disappointment. The pain was no worse than the quick sting of a booster shot. And yet thinking about this makes me ache again. How is it that as a child I knew I should have been loved more? Is everyone born with a bottomless emotional resevoir?

I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shattering blow when she died. I was 16.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.

I was pretty locked up emotionally as a kid - my family situation was tumultuous. But I was extroverted. So when I was in pain, I would tell jokes instead of expressing myself.

I grew up weird - very sensitive and highly inhibited. I felt like I was born in the wrong time zone to the wrong people at the wrong place.

Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.

When you start suppressing feelings at an early age, it hurts you down the road. Full expression of anger and pain is very important.

I was not very strong growing up, and my uncle used to look at me, like, 'This kid is not growing up, he is growing tall but he can be broken like a banana.' The banana in Congo is called 'Dikembe.' So my uncle start calling me, 'Dikembe, Dikembe, look at you Dikembe, you cannot even stand up.' It took a long time for me to walk.

There was probably something as a child I wanted to express, something unsaid that I needed to share.

I remember when I was a little boy my father didn't love me; he couldn't. He loved my older brother but he couldn't love me somehow, at least not in a way I could understand it.

This is an old family secret, and I just found this out recently, and it almost broke my heart. My mother said to me, 'I had never told you this, but God, you were an ugly baby'.

As a kid, I would push my shoulders forward in order to hide my heart from being hurt.

I moved around so much when I was younger that I sort of had to have this type of exterior; you know, I was afraid of getting hurt.

Parents become very good at not hearing the explicit words and listening instead to what the child means but doesn't yet know how to say: 'I'm lonely, in pain, frightened' - distress which then unfairly comes out as an attack on the safest, kindest, most reliable thing in the child's world: the parent.

I bottled up all my emotions and forced myself to grow up faster than I needed to.

I felt like that growing up - that I didn't have a voice.