Governments hesitate to call the horror by its name, for to do so would oblige them to act.
The Tutsi genocide in Rwanda
My kids have never seen me scream at anybody. They've never seen an argument. There's never been even a cold silence. And those are things that I grew up with because my parents did end up divorcing.
Since I had the baby I can't tolerate anything violent or sad, I saw the Matrix and I had my eyes closed through a lot of it, though I didn't need to. I would peek, and then think, oh OK, I can see that.
Here I am not the one to throw out. No one steals my warmth and shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat because I drop in fear and weakness. No one screams at the sight of me. No one watches my body for how it is unseemly. With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me.
I was so tiny when my parents split up that I can't remember them ever being together. That was never an issue, as I guess I never went through the trauma of them splitting up.
In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top of them with the phone saying, "Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine." The trunks shudder.
I just felt like I didn't have to go back to football. Anytime I don't have to hit somebody, I'm all for it.
Yeah, like, when I look back on my life, I just remember back what happened in '74, or something. It seems like only the real good stuff comes to mind. I don't think of all the tragedies and all the funerals. That just doesn't come to mind at all. I guess I'm really blessed that way.
What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.
I have a good memory for certain things. And a very short memory for painful things - that's my favorite Martha Stewart quote, by the way.
Victims don't want to know they're victims. I guess that's just victim psychology: if you don't know about it, it's not really happening.
We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.
My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments.
I do a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things from my memory.
When something's painful, you just avoid it. Why bother dredging up the past if it's nothing but bad stuff?
I feel that I fell somewhat under that category where I was using fighting to kind of run from my own self to an extent, to kind of numb the things that I thought about myself. When I had fighting taken away, I was forced to look at myself in the mirror and say, 'What are you without fighting?'
We have developed this unbelievable ability to deny. We have to. If we didn't, we'd go crazy.
My priorities are: I need to be good; I need to be well within for my children to be well within; and then the creative process flows, organically and smoothly. I'm not looking to experience what I went through in the 'Livin' La Vida Loca' days again.
Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including our selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment.
Growing up, there were a lot of funerals that I attended, and the adults at the funerals went out of their way to make sure that I wasn't traumatized or overly depressed by them. So death is always a celebration of life for me, and it's also hugely dramatic.
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
It seems like only the real good stuff comes to mind. I don't think of all the tragedies.
I remembered Owen telling me how music had saved him in Phoenix, that it drowned everything out, and it was the same for me now. As long as I had something to listen to, I could blur the things I didn't want to think about, if not block them out completely.
