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Category: Lidia Yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch

is a way for anger to come out as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage. When I watch Andy work the heavy bag, or work his body to drop doing mixed martial arts, I see that anger can go somewhere – out and away from a body – like an energy let loose and given form. Like my junk comes out in art.

Lidia Yuknavitch

Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory–but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.

Lidia Yuknavitch

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, lemme tell you. Those are big years. Everybody always thinks of it as a time of adolescence—just getting through to the real part of your life—but it’s more than that. Sometimes your whole life happens in those years, and the rest of your life it’s just the same story playing out with different characters. I could die tomorrow and have lived the main ups and downs of life. Pain. Loss. Love. And what you all so fondly refer to as wisdom. Wanna know the difference between adult wisdom and young adult wisdom? You have the ability to look back at your past and interpret it. I have the ability to look at my present and live it with my whole body.

adolescence, dora-a-headcase, inspirational, lidia, wisdom, ya, young-adult, youth, yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch

You see it is important to understand how damaged people don’t always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It’s a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of feeling something good. The shame of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red As on our chests. I never thought to myself growing up, be a lawyer. An astronaut. The President. A scientist. A doctor. An architect. I didn’t even think, be a writer. Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It’s difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.

growth, survivor, transformation, trauma

Lidia Yuknavitch

Seventeen times against the wall or in the barn: You move or scream or say anything I will kill them all. In front of you. First I will torture them and then I will kill them. Her eyes as dead as she can make them. Her arms as limp as she can make them. Her heart as hidden as she can make it. A soldier’s cock entering the thin white flesh of a girl, into the small red cave of her, the fist of her heart pounding out be-dead, be-dead, be-dead.Counting.

Lidia Yuknavitch

There’s a girl calm people don’t know about. It’s a girl teen standstill. A motionless peace. It doesn’t come from anywhere but inside us, and it only lasts for a few years. It’s born from being a not woman yet. It’s free flowing and invisible. It’s the eye of the violent storm you call my teenage daughter. In this place we are undisturbed by all the moronic things you think about us. Our voices like rain falling. We are serene. Smooth. With more perfect hair and skin than you will ever again know. Daughters of Eve.

dora, girl, headcase, inspiration, lidia, power, teenager, teenagers-and-parents, yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch

What we need, is a break out. Out of our lives, out of Seattle, out of the dumb script of girl.

girl, inspirational, lidia, script, seattle, yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch

And so, now, she runs. In her running, her mind leaves her.And she can hear nothing but her heart, the blast making her deaf.There is a great white silent empty in her running.She runs.

Lidia Yuknavitch

my parents Oedipal fakers

abusive-parent, parents

Lidia Yuknavitch

Where does repressed pain and rage go in a body? Does the wound of daughter turn to something else if left unattended? Does it bloom in the belly like an anti-child, like an organic mass made of emotions that didn’t have anywhere to go? How do we name the pain of rage in a woman? Mother?

Lidia Yuknavitch

However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It’s what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience. The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can’t remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever.

memoir, storytelling, truth

Lidia Yuknavitch

We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.

blue, memory, past, swimmers, water