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9029f9e
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Each of us extracted different people from our parents by our personalities and hence we had different experiences growing up.
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Lisa Unger |
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a1f3d6e
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But that's the thing about mental illness; there's no such thing as a cookie-cutter diagnosis. We're all crazy in our own special way. Some of us just have it worse than others.
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Lisa Unger |
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074f09e
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He'd been raised to give women what they wanted. 'You can fight,' his father told him. 'You can bitch. If you're a real prick, you can overpower. But the pain over the long haul ... just not worth it, son. Surrender young and happily with fewer scars.' The old man was right about that.
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Lisa Unger |
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e53d643
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Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood.
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Lisa Unger |
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258c626
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You can put on a mask and a costume for the rest of the world, but you can't hide from the people who changed your diapers.
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Lisa Unger |
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d734a12
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It was fear. Fear that, after all the years of protecting his health, his heart, his mind, setting bedtimes and boundaries, giving warnings about strangers and looking both ways before crossing the street, it wouldn't be enough. Fear that, as he stood on the threshold of adulthood, forces beyond their control would take him down a path where they could no longer reach him. Fear that he'd be seduced by something ugly and would choose it. And..
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Lisa Unger |
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4ba8953
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When you're young it's easy to confuse passion for love.
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passion
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Lisa Unger |
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eeb4fec
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You didn't wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family.
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Lisa Unger |
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7783cd2
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The woman I was seems hopelessly naive. I envy her.
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Lisa Unger |
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2317048
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Maybe that's all life was, this impossibly complicated helix of choice and accident, things you could control and couldn't. And when the day was done, the only measure of success was how happy you were, how much you loved and were loved.
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Lisa Unger |
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1419ea3
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Life is an impossible twist of choice and circumstance. One rarely exists without the other.
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Lisa Unger |
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f82b4a5
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But in the end, it's not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it's how you choose to react to them. That's where you have control over your life.
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Lisa Unger |
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f616089
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For what other reason might we cling to objects, old photographs, tarnished jewelry, yellowed letters? They're charms, little pieces of magic. When we touch them, we regain for a second what time has stolen or worn away.
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Lisa Unger |
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e189341
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What is the difference between justice and revenge?" he asked. ... "Revenge seeks chaos," he said. "Justice seeks balance. That's the difference."
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Lisa Unger |
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a38e0ce
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I started thinking about how to draw her, how I'd capture all the things I saw in just those few moments that our lives intersected. Faces are so hard because they are more than lines and shadows. They are about light, but a light that comes from inside and shines out.
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Lisa Unger |
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80f85de
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Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can break your heart.
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Lisa Unger |
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cd429aa
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IF YOU REALLY let life take you, if you release control and stop clinging to sameness, you can't imagine the places you'll end up. But most people don't do that. Most people get this death grip on what they know, and the only thing that loosens their grasp is some kind of tragedy.
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Lisa Unger |
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54ca226
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There was something eternal about loss, something endless. You could always lose the things you had, but you couldn't always get back the things you lost.
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Lisa Unger |
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5cee798
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grief is not linear. It's not a slow progression forward toward healing, it's a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.
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Lisa Unger |
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5b014d7
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I should have been sending up flares, instead I was offering smiles.
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Lisa Unger |
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561b658
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Never forget those first five minutes, when you thought how much you loved each other was the only thing that mattered. Because in truth it is the only thing that matters. That love is what gets you through all the other stuff.
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Lisa Unger |
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8d86f3d
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It's all these choices that we could have made, the things we might have done. We see them with perfect clarity only long after the moment has passed. Just thirty seconds either way, and I wouldn't have this story to tell you. I wouldn't be the same person telling it.
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Lisa Unger |
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620f60a
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Maybe that alone was the foundation of a good marriage, an endless willingness to forgive and to love in spite of ourselves, an ability to ride the highs and endure the lows, the decision to always go home. She
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Lisa Unger |
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18f620a
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When you hate women, you hate all the female elements of your own psychology. Jung believed that there were two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. The animus is the unconscious male, and the anima is the unconscious female. Because a man's anima, his more sensitive, feeling side, must so often be repressed, it forms the ultimate shadow self--a dark side that is hated and buried. Jung was a big believer in accepting ..
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Lisa Unger |
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fcc4b25
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As parents, we must accept that our children are who they are. We can't make them into something we want, or be disappointed in them because they don't meet our artificial expectations.
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Lisa Unger |
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5027500
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It's never one thing that leads to a tragic accident, she was sure she'd read once--though she couldn't say where. It's usually seven things--seven mistakes, or errors in judgment, or acts of negligence. If you reverse engineer any major disaster--oil spill or train derailment or airplane crash--there are usually seven things that had to go wrong in order for them to occur. Claudia
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Lisa Unger |
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b0ed322
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You were never so acutely aware of your own flaws as you were in the presence of your child. Why was that? The
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Lisa Unger |
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74541f6
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Birdie wondered why that so often seemed to be the case--once you had what you wanted, it was a shadow of what you'd dreamed it to be.
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Lisa Unger |
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5224d45
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Fear holds on. Love lets go.
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Lisa Unger |
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ad51bc2
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All she could think of was how pure and unblemished, how soft and pink his baby skin had been. How his wonderful body, small and pristine, used to feel in her arms, how she'd kiss every inch of him, marveling at his beauty. When she was a new mom, she'd felt like she couldn't pull her eyes away. Now she cast her eyes back at her catalog quickly, not wanting to look at her own son, at what he'd seen fit to do to his beautiful body.....Not a ..
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Lisa Unger |
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47c7822
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Honestly, it's the most you can ask of men sometimes. They're so wound up, so buried beneath layers of "boys don't cry," and "pussy," and "man up," that they don't even know how to feel about anything. I should know."
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Lisa Unger |
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359edf7
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Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives its many flaws and quirks.
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Lisa Unger |
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354422b
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Memory is elastic, and no two people have the same version of any given event. Our versions of our own lives are necessarily fictional to some degree, wouldn't you agree?
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Lisa Unger |
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30d381b
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there was only one rule. Work hard and be nice, and everything would go just fine. That should be the rule for life, too, Emily thought. But, of course, that wasn't how things went.
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rule-for-life
work-hard
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Lisa Unger |
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3307185
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Didn't it seem like really thin, gorgeous people were always so mean? Where did they get that aura of entitlement? And didn't it seem like people always fawned over them even though they behaved badly? Why was that?
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sense-of-entitlement
mean
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Lisa Unger |
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63847c5
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She wanted to take those words back. But they were out, shattering in the air all around them, slicing them both.
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Lisa Unger |
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0468779
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when we put on clothes, we're telling ourselves something, and we're communicating that something to every person we meet.
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Lisa Unger |
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63eedec
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Dysfunction isn't a choice, it's a disease.
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Lisa Unger |
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ad8a2f1
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We count so much on politeness, those of us who are hiding things. We count on people not staring too long, or asking too many questions.
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Lisa Unger |
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3b38ec5
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We hate our parents for having their own lives, don't we, for making decisions for themselves that don't seem to take us into account. They're not people, not really. They're parents; how dare they live and love and die without us?
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Lisa Unger |
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6bd2c13
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I couldn't leave there without carrying some of her sadness and loneliness with me like a cloak. There was a smell that I've come to think of as life rot. Where a life has spoiled, gone bad through lack of use.
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Lisa Unger |
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3c36de6
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In that moment,feeling my isolation in a way I never had before, I thought about calling her. But I didn't want to hear the fear and disappointment in her voice. I didn't want to to deal with her expectations of me. Maybe that's why we choose to isolate ourselves, those of us who do. Because in so many ways, it's just easier.
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Lisa Unger |
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aa442bb
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Never talk to strangers. If someone ever tries to take you, fight with everything you have. Scream as loud as you can. (He'd never told her what to do if the man was too strong and there was no one to hear her screaming.)
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horror
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Lisa Unger |
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fe3b7ba
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When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That's why you can't fall in love with beauty.
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Lisa Unger |