Blogtober: my favourite quotes

I have a lot of quotes I like. And I think it is because a lot of them speak to me in my chronic pain and illness struggles in a way other things do not. They have power where my own words can fail me at times.

So here are some of my favourite quotes

“Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.”

Ans I think to myself through all my pain all suffering and all my illness… I hunt down those gleams of sunshine.

“Sometimes I think I’m Diagonally parked in a parallel universe.”

Sometimes I feel like a square that society is trying to shove into a circular hole.

I have written a few poems about this sense of just not quite fitting into societal norms:

There in the labyrinth, I’m blind

With smiling eyes and golden lies

Free my mind

Take off my disguise

Take off my disguise

Flee from the dark,

With smiling eyes and golden lies

Unscathed, unmarked

Into the light, I flee

There in the labyrinth, I’m blind

And now, now I see

Freed my mind

AND

Soul Yearnings

My soul haunts a place,

It has never seen

It is ever displaced,

In the between.

I was made for a land

That doesn’t exist

My soul’s demand

Forever missed.

“I am half agony, half hope”

To me, this defined chronic pain which I have lived with for over 20 years

This is part of an Emily Dickinson poem, which is one of my favourites. “There is a pain-so utter- it swallows substance up”

And this, my friends, is high pain. It consumes. There is nothing left for the world. There is just the pain.

The whole thing goes:

599

There is a pain—so utter—
It swallows substance up—
Then covers the Abyss with Trance—
So Memory can step
Around—across—upon it—
As one within a Swoon—
Goes safely—where an open eye—
Would drop Him—Bone by Bone.

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

Doctors do not know a lot about pain or how to treat it. Or how to listen to us with chronic pain because we have become so stoic out of necessity. If you are silent, the pain will consume you, and perhaps kill you. If you are silent and die by suicide they will just blame you. if you are silent and seeking pain management they will blame you, tell you that opiates make you an addict and say you must suffer.

And finally my favourite writing quote:

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”

Love it. Bleed for it. Live it. It is about just immersing in that passion.

And I have a poem for that too:

The Writer

The brain of a philosopher

Thought thinking itself

With the soul of a writer

Too many books on the shelf.

The body layered with pain,

a tormented life.

The mind keeps her sane,

stays pains knife.

Other posts to check out:

Blogtober: Things that make me happy

Poem: Shattered

Poem: The line