And We Drown

A collection of quotes, excerpts, and books from a wide variety of authors and sources.

[tillhumanvoiceswakeus]

Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

Mark Vonnegut, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So

[tillhumanvoiceswakeus]

Who you are doesn't cease to exist because there's nobody there to admire it.

READ THIS IF, Thought Catalog

[tillhumanvoiceswakeus]

In my house there are a hundred half-done poems.  Each of us leaves an unfinished life.

Thinking of Swirler, Mary Oliver

[tillhumanvoiceswakeus]

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed.  I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

Upstream, Mary Oliver

[tillhumanvoiceswakeus]

I have the body I need to live my best life.

The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor

[tillhumanvoiceswakeus]

...one cannot live at one's limits for long.  One cannot stay there indefinitely, not even for love.

The Fixed Stars, Molly Wizenberg

[tillhumanvoiceswakeus]

What I have found much harder to let go is the memory of my healthier self.  With each new symptom, each new impairment, I grieve again for the lost time, the lost years that are now not yet to come.  This is not to say that I wish for a cure--not exactly.  I wish to be both myself and not-myself, a state of paradoxical longing that I think every person with chronic pain occupies at some point or another.  I wish for time to split and allow two paths for my life and that I could move back and forth between them at will.

“Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time” by Ellen Samuels from Disability Visibility

[tillhumanvoiceswakeus]

oh cerebellum, oh Lithium, do your job.

“Portrait of a Release” from Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman

[tillhumanvoiceswakeus]

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot