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30fd3c8
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Who you marry, what you choose as your profession, how you were raised--yes, that is the big picture. But, as they say, the devil's in the details.
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Lisa Unger |
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7d4b91b
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I love the way Beck loves. If everyone loved like she did, the world would be a better place.
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Lisa Unger |
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603d736
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People who kill themselves generally suffer from severe clinical depression," I said. "Their reasons for choosing suicide are not always rational. It's often a chemical imbalance that leads them to the choice."
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Lisa Unger |
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d1952be
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You can't squeeze blood from a stone. You can try, but you do all the bleeding.
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Lisa Unger |
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223e546
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Emily thought maybe it was simpler than that: Some people gave money instead of love because it was all they had to give. A full bank account and a life of good deeds achieved with money didn't mean a full heart or a giving soul--often just the opposite.
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Lisa Unger |
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dd4513a
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No one ever talks about issues like dissociative identity disorder, fugue, or psychotic breaks in anything but the most negative light. No one ever talks about how the personality does this type of thing to protect itself, to save itself, or how powerful and effective it is." I"
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Lisa Unger |
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f69c798
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When I look back on my life, I marvel at how it hasn't been the major decisions that have most impacted its course. It's been the tiny, seemingly inconsequential ones. Think about it. Think about the sudden events that have affected your life. With most of them, wasn't it just a matter of seconds one way or the other? Wasn't it the little decisions that caused you to cross this street or that, to move yourself into or out of harm's way? The..
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Lisa Unger |
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8019329
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I agree. I have a therapist now, one with whom I'm actually honest, and we've been over the events of my life again and again--rehashing without judgment the things I've done, the things that have been done to me, and how I ultimately saved myself.
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Lisa Unger |
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f1be722
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Anger is not the absence of love. Anger broke you apart. Love and anger wrap around each other and becomes one living thing inside your heart.
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Lisa Unger |
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300c08b
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Eloise knew that it was so much more complicated than that. There are no trades in this life, and depression is a dark, dark doorway some people have no choice but to walk through.
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Lisa Unger |
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96b9c65
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Somehow I escaped punishment in that life, and so now, lifetimes later, a very special kind of hell is being rained down on me, the full rage of karmic justice.
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Lisa Unger |
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bc13698
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He's dead, Annie. But as long as you haven't dealt with the memories of the things he has done to you, he'll live on. We'll always have to face these times when you think he's returned for you. You'll never be free." It"
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Lisa Unger |
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9caa40f
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It was a funny, impossible little trap of nature, motherhood. It muddled your brain with floods of hormones and sleep deprivation, kept you constantly busy tending to a million needs, had you forever thinking about the care of others. You could disappear into motherhood, forget completely that once upon a time you were an athlete, a graduate student, that you had ambitions to go into politics, change the world. That once upon a time you wan..
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Lisa Unger |
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484d022
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Wasn't there some belief about how if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump right out? But if you put it in cold water and turn up the heat gradually, it will allow itself to slowly cook to death?
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Lisa Unger |
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c5cc7c1
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There were 9,780 living souls populating The Hollows. There were good people and bad ones, people with secrets and dark appetites, happy people, and people buckling under the weight of grief and sorrow. There were people who were looking for things and loved ones they had lost, and people hiding. There were lost people, trying to find their way home. Each of them was connected to the others in ways that were obvious or as hidden as the aban..
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Lisa Unger |
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aa68656
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But that was the hypocrisy of adulthood: You never wanted the children you cared about to do things you'd done when you were heedless of the fragility of life.
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Lisa Unger |
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0ad223f
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I was about to leave when my flashlight caught something. A bright white envelope tacked on the board among the yellowed and faded detritus. It had my name on it in the child's printed hand, which was now familiar to me. I walked over quickly and grabbed it down. Instead of ripping it open, I stuck it inside my jacket. I suddenly had a strong urge to get the hell out of there. But as I moved toward the door, I saw a large dark form pass in ..
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Lisa Unger |
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91c3593
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DEPRESSION IS NOT dramatic, but it is total. It's sneaky--you almost don't notice it at first. Like a cat burglar, it comes in through an open window while you're sleeping. It takes little things at first: your appetite, your desire to return phone calls. Then it comes back for the big stuff, like your will to live. The next thing you know, your legs are filled with sand. The thought of brushing your teeth fills you with dread, it seems lik..
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Lisa Unger |
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c8fd989
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Or she could listen to that other voice, the voice that wasn't a voice but something so deep, so indivisible from her own consciousness that it didn't have sound.
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Lisa Unger |
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6144641
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Her mother always said that when you were sad or worried or angry, that you had to do something. Anything. Go for a walk. Make cookies. Draw a picture. Clean your room. Never just lie there and feel sad or mad, because those feelings become like weights, holding you down, and they only get heavier, and you only get less likely to move them.
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Lisa Unger |
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fb74a85
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Let's love our girls well and protect their spirits, Introduce them to their own strength and power, and Keep them as bright and beautiful as the day they were born.
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Lisa Unger |
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aba4ccf
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Most of us don't live in the present tense. We dwell in a mental place where our regrets and grudges from our past compete with our fears about the future. Sometimes we barely notice what's going on around us, we're so busy time traveling. Before Victory was born, I could spend whole days trying to sort out the things that have happened to me, the terrible mistakes I've made. I marinated in my anger and self-loathing, cataloged all the diff..
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Lisa Unger |
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cf74b16
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The rich and vivid imagining that served her so well on the page was torture in her real life sometimes, if she let her thoughts sweep her away.
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Lisa Unger |
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20918d3
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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.
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Lisa Unger |
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d3ecd38
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Hateful feelings could crop up in a marriage, like weeds pushing their way through concrete. If you weren't vigilant, they took over quickly, like kudzu, depriving love of light and air until it withered and died. It was a slow, silent death, impossible to imagine in the heat of new love.
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Lisa Unger |
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0dae57f
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I don't believe in regret. If you regret things about your life, then I'll bet that you're not paying attention. Regret is just imagining that you know what would have happened if you took that job in California or married your high school sweetheart or just looked one more time before you stepped out into the street...or didn't. But you don't know; you can't possibly know.
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Lisa Unger |
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1119433
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it was the dawn of a new day that Birdie prized. It was God's little reminder that no matter how dark the night, the sun always rises.
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Lisa Unger |
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f88eacd
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The choices we made ... These were the right choices. They were positive and proactive. And it was, for a time, good for everyone, most especially our boy. But were these choices really? Or were they reactions? Reactions to something that life had thrown at us, something we didn't choose and didn't want. Is there a difference between reaction and choice? I don't know the answer.
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Lisa Unger |
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2b60f67
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wondering why people held on to anger and sadness, gripped it tight, let it dictate the course of their lives, but found it so hard to find and keep love.
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Lisa Unger |
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f2d486d
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He wondered what it would be like to grow up in one place and stay there all your life, to forever be defined by your childhood relationships, to never know if you got to be the person you wanted to be, to always be the person you were when you were young.
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Lisa Unger |
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ddd8b2e
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There was a story Chuck's father used to tell about the boy who spread a rumor against a good doctor in the town where he lived. When the boy went to make amends, the doctor asked him to cut open a feather pillow and let the wind take the feathers away, then to come back the next day. When the boy returned, the doctor asked him to collect all the feathers and put them back in the pillowcase. Of course, it could never be done. Those feathers..
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Lisa Unger |
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6b28af1
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Sometimes it seemed like that was all it was, motherhood--grief and guilt and fear. You said good-bye a little every day--from the minute they left your body until they left your home.
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Lisa Unger |
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ab5871b
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She did love him, in that way that teenage girls love, like a lemming. Which is not love, of course.
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Lisa Unger |
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e231847
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counseling. She said that 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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37de3e6
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This was what happened. Abused boys became dangerous men. Those around them with a self-preservation instinct--even the people who loved them--started to move away.
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Lisa Unger |
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8a0be85
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Maybe it was hereditary, anger. Maybe it lay dormant in boyhood, the disease taking hold in late adolescence. Then it either burned out before any damage was done, or took control.
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Lisa Unger |
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122827f
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She could push inside or walk away. She could force a conversation, which might turn into a fight. Or just let him come to her when he was ready. She hesitated a moment, conflicted. Then she opted for the latter, moving quietly down the stairs, feeling that strange loneliness again. Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood.
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Lisa Unger |
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accad0f
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For a while, she'd held on to some illusion of control. And then, right about the time Ricky gave up his afternoon nap, she finally understood that for all the schedules and consistency, the rewards and reprimands, ultimately it's the child who chooses how to behave. It's the parent's responsibility to provide the safe environment, the predictable rules, the loving discipline, and the healthy meals, but ultimately the child has to be the on..
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Lisa Unger |
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bfe2022
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Jones still labored under the delusion that he could bend Ricky to his way of thinking, that with anger, hard words, and harsh punishment he could force their son to do and be what he wanted--in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
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Lisa Unger |
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506699f
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Where I train we smack our palms and knuckles against cinderblocks. This action creates tiny fissures in the bones. When those fissures heal, the bone is stronger. I can put the blade of my palm through a two-by-four.
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Lisa Unger |
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c675e3e
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there were only two ways of being in the world. You either walked through life acting out of love, or you acted out of fear.
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Lisa Unger |
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da0d323
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The watercolor sky--silver fading to blue fading to black, the high slice of moon and glimmering stars--reminded her that she'd always wanted to paint but didn't know how, was in some ways afraid of the idea of putting brush to canvas, of making a mark that couldn't be erased. The idea that she might create something that was laughable, pitiable, or silly had stopped her from ever taking a class or even buying paints. Foolish. It was foolis..
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Lisa Unger |
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cc4923f
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My mother always told me that if you're embarrassed by a kindness and don't know what to say, keep it simple. "Thank you." --
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Lisa Unger |
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ff564be
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Totally different outcomes; we've made totally different choices in our lives. Like I said, how you were raised is part of the big picture. It's one important factor in a million. 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.
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Lisa Unger |