Open your eyes. Your tears cut a trail. Your scars build a ladder that takes you to a place that you could not have gotten to any other way. Take a look around, remember every second, every breath, every choked scream. Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength. Move on.

Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength, move on.

I learned another thing from the hurt my cousin gave me - never to give that kind of hurt to anyone else. My revenge was to change a bad feeling into a good one. If I'm working with you and I sense you're feeling a little insecure, I try to make you feel great. That's how I get rid of my old hurt. If I don't do that, my hurt grows and makes me mean and vengeful. But if hurt can change to kindness - that's something Mama showed me - the world becomes a little less cruel.

As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.

Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

The best revenge is living well without you.

The best revenge is living well.

I’ve spent half of my life not knowing the difference between killing myself and fighting back. What if I don’t want healing
as much as I want justice? What if I don’t care if justice looks exactly like revenge? Do you think I don’t know that I can’t want revenge without strapping the bomb to my own chest? That’s how the dominoes of trauma fall. You become just another thing about to detonate.

First Memory

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was — for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

Living well is the best revenge.

We survive by learning from pain

i use pain to push me to greatness

If anything, I was proud of it. I had endured I told myself. I was so strong. But this is not strength. It is only endurance. A kind of emotional or therapeutic anorexia. I was not strong. Or if I was, it was the adrenaline of the wounded. I was really only broken, moving through the landscape as if I were not, and taking all my pride in believing I was passing as whole.

The past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it.