I Hate Being Blamed Quotes

There I was, cold, isolated and desperate for something I knew I couldn't have. A solution. A remedy. Anything. ...I hated it. Alone and confused was the last place I wanted to be. Somehow I knew I deserved this.

Clary, Despite everything, I can't bear the thought of this ring being lost forever, any more then I can bear the thought of leaving you forever. And though I have no choice about the one, at least I can choose about the other. I'm leaving you our family ring because you have as much right to it as I do. I'm writing this watching the sun come up. You're asleep, dreams moving behind your restless eyelids. I wish I knew what you were thinking. I wish I could slip into your head and see the world the way you do. I wish I could see myself the way you do. But maybe I dont want to see that. Maybe it would make me feel even more than I already do that I'm perpetuating some kind of Great Lie on you, and I couldn't stand that. I belong to you. You could do anything you wanted with me and I would let you. You could ask anything of me and I'd break myself trying to make you happy. My heart tells me this is the best and greatest feeling I have ever had. But my mind knows the difference between wanting what you can't have and wanting what you shouldn't want. And I shouldn't want you. All night I've watched you sleeping, watched the moonlight come and go, casting its shadows across your face in black and white. I've never seen anything more beautiful. I think of the life we could have had if things were different, a life where this night is not a singular event, separate from everything else that's real, but every night. But things aren't different, and I can't look at you without feeling like I've tricked you into loving me. The truth no one is willing to say out loud is that no one has a shot against Valentine but me. I can get close to him like no one else can. I can pretend I want to join him and he'll believe me, up until that last moment where I end it all, one way or another. I have something of Sebastian's; I can track him to where my father's hiding, and that's what I'm going to do. So I lied to you last night. I said I just wanted one night with you. But I want every night with you. And that's why I have to slip out of your window now, like a coward. Because if I had to tell you this to your face, I couldn't make myself go. I don't blame you if you hate me, I wish you would. As long as I can still dream, I will dream of you. _Jace

I call upon you to draw from the depths of your being — to prove that we are a human race, to prove that our love outweighs our need to hate, that our compassion is more compelling than our need to blame

I would say I’m sorry, but you wouldn’t believe me. I don’t blame you for that, but don’t you dare insinuate that what I’ve done with you was purely an act or that what I’m feeling is fake when I’ve spent my entire godsdam life not being allowed to want or even feel anything for myself! Not when I spent the last three years hating myself for the relief I felt when you didn’t take me because it meant I didn’t have to do what was expected of me.

To my son, If you are reading this letter, then I am dead. I expect to die, if not today, then soon. I expect that Valentine will kill me. For all his talk of loving me, for all his desire for a right-hand man, he knows that I have doubts. And he is a man who cannot abide doubt. I do not know how you will be brought up. I do not know what they will tell you about me. I do not even know who will give you this letter. I entrust it to Amatis, but I cannot see what the future holds. All I know is that this is my chance to give you an accounting of a man you may well hate. There are three things you must know about me. The first is that I have been a coward. Throughout my life I have made the wrong decisions, because they were easy, because they were self-serving, because I was afraid. At first I believed in Valentine’s cause. I turned from my family and to the Circle because I fancied myself better than Downworlders and the Clave and my suffocating parents. My anger against them was a tool Valentine bent to his will as he bent and changed so many of us. When he drove Lucian away I did not question it but gladly took his place for my own. When he demanded I leave Amatis, the woman I love, and marry Celine, a girl I did not know, I did as he asked, to my everlasting shame. I cannot imagine what you might be thinking now, knowing that the girl I speak of was your mother. The second thing you must know is this. Do not blame Celine for any of this, whatever you do. It was not her fault, but mine. Your mother was an innocent from a family that brutalized her. She wanted only kindess, to feel safe and loved. And though my heart had been given already, I loved her, in my fashion, just as in my heart, I was faithful to Amatis. Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae. I wonder if you love Latin as I do, and poetry. I wonder who has taught you. The third and hardest thing you must know is that I was prepared to hate you. The son of myslef and the child-bride I barely knew, you seemed to be the culmination of all the wrong decisions I had made, all the small compromises that led to my dissolution. Yet as you grew inside my mind, as you grew in the world, a blameless innocent, I began to realize that I did not hate you. It is the nature of parents to see their own image in their children, and it was myself I hated, not you. For there is only one thing I wan from you, my son — one thing from you, and of you. I want you to be a better man than I was. Let no one else tell you who you are or should be. Love where you wish to. Believe as you wish to. Take freedom as your right. I don’t ask that you save the world, my boy, my child, the only child I will ever have. I ask only that you be happy. Stephen

So many of my sisters are so completely unaware of who the real criminals and dogs are. They blame themselves for being hungry; they hate themselves for surviving the best way they know how, to see so much fear, doubt, hurt, and self hatred is the most painful part of being in this concentration camp. "Anyway, in spite of all, i feel a breeze behind my neck, turning to a hurricane and when i take a deep breath I can smell freedom

Throughout the ordeal, I learned that getting mad was easier than being sad. Anger was something I could control. I could settle into an easy rhythm of blame and hate. Focus my energy on something than the ache in my heart.

I was born free, and that I might live in freedom I chose the solitude of the fields; in the trees of the mountains I find society, the clear waters of the brooks are my mirrors, and to the trees and waters I make known my thoughts and charms. I am a fire afar off, a sword laid aside. Those whom I have inspired with love by letting them see me, I have by words undeceived, and if their longings live on hope—and I have given none to Chrysostom or to any other—it cannot justly be said that the death of any is my doing, for it was rather his own obstinacy than my cruelty that killed him; and if it be made a charge against me that his wishes were honourable, and that therefore I was bound to yield to them, I answer that when on this very spot where now his grave is made he declared to me his purity of purpose, I told him that mine was to live in perpetual solitude, and that the earth alone should enjoy the fruits of my retirement and the spoils of my beauty; and if, after this open avowal, he chose to persist against hope and steer against the wind, what wonder is it that he should sink in the depths of his infatuation? If I had encouraged him, I should be false; if I had gratified him, I should have acted against my own better resolution and purpose. He was persistent in spite of warning, he despaired without being hated. Bethink you now if it be reasonable that his suffering should be laid to my charge. Let him who has been deceived complain, let him give way to despair whose encouraged hopes have proved vain, let him flatter himself whom I shall entice, let him boast whom I shall receive; but let not him call me cruel or homicide to whom I make no promise, upon whom I practise no deception, whom I neither entice nor receive. It has not been so far the will of Heaven that I should love by fate, and to expect me to love by choice is idle. Let this general declaration serve for each of my suitors on his own account, and let it be understood from this time forth that if anyone dies for me it is not of jealousy or misery he dies, for she who loves no one can give no cause for jealousy to any, and candour is not to be confounded with scorn. Let him who calls me wild beast and basilisk, leave me alone as something noxious and evil; let him who calls me ungrateful, withhold his service; who calls me wayward, seek not my acquaintance; who calls me cruel, pursue me not; for this wild beast, this basilisk, this ungrateful, cruel, wayward being has no kind of desire to seek, serve, know, or follow them. If Chrysostom's impatience and violent passion killed him, why should my modest behaviour and circumspection be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the society of the trees, why should he who would have me preserve it among men, seek to rob me of it? I have, as you know, wealth of my own, and I covet not that of others; my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.

In Plaster I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now: This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, And the white person is certainly the superior one. She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints. 
At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality -- She lay in bed with me like a dead body 
And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was 
 Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints. I couldn't sleep for a week, she was so cold. I blamed her for everything, but she didn't answer. 
I couldn't understand her stupid behavior! 
When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist. 
Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her: She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages. 

Without me, she wouldn't exist, so of course she was grateful. 
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose 
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain, And it was I who attracted everybody's attention, 
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed. 
I patronized her a little, and she lapped it up -- 
You could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality. 

I didn't mind her waiting on me, and she adored it. 
In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun 
From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn't help but notice 
Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience: She humored my weakness like the best of nurses, 
Holding my bones in place so they would mend properly. In time our relationship grew more intense. 

She stopped fitting me so closely and seemed offish. 
I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself, 
As if my habits offended her in some way. She let in the drafts and became more and more absent-minded. 
And my skin itched and flaked away in soft pieces 
Simply because she looked after me so badly. Then I saw what the trouble was: she thought she was immortal. She wanted to leave me, she thought she was superior, 
And I'd been keeping her in the dark, and she was resentful -- Wasting her days waiting on a half-corpse! 
And secretly she began to hope I'd die. Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover me entirely, 
And wear my painted face the way a mummy-case Wears the face of a pharaoh, though it's made of mud and water. 

I wasn't in any position to get rid of her. She'd supported me for so long I was quite limp -- I had forgotten how to walk or sit, So I was careful not to upset her in any way 
Or brag ahead of time how I'd avenge myself. Living with her was like living with my own coffin: Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully. I used to think we might make a go of it together -- 
After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close. 
Now I see it must be one or the other of us. She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy, 
But she'll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit. I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her, 
And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me. --written 26 Feburary 1961

I think you’re happy giving people your scraps. I think that’s easy for you, and I don’t blame you, because I hate being like this, and I wish I was more like you.

Powerless is losing everything you love and blaming it on others.  In the end, being powerless over addiction leads to being alone with the one person you hate most of all –yourself.

I hate being fat. I hate the way people look at me, or don't. I hate being a joke; I hate the disorienting limbo between too visible and invisible; I hate the way that complete strangers waste my life out of supposed concern for my death. I hate knowing that if I did die of a condition that correlates with weight, a certain subset of people would feel their prejudices validated, and some would outright celebrate. I also love being fat. The breadth of my shoulders makes me feel safe. I am unassailable. I intimidate. I am a polar icebreaker. I walk and climb and lift things, I can open your jar, I can absorb blows - literal and metaphorical - meant for other women, smaller woman, breakable women women who need me. My bones feel like iron - heavy, but strong. I used to say that being fat in our culture was like drowning (in hate, in blame, in your own tissue), but lately I think it's more like burning. After three decades in the fire, my iron bones are steel.

Why Does He Do That? That's the number one question, isn't it? Maybe it's his drinking, you say. Maybe it's his learning disabilities. It's his job; he hates it. He's stressed. I think he's bipolar. It's his mother's fault; she spoiled him rotten. It's the drugs. If only he didn't use. It's his temper. He's selfish. It's the pornography; he's obsessed. The list could go on and on. You could spend many years trying to pinpoint it and never get a definite answer. The fact is, many people have these problems and they aren't abusive. Just because someone is an alcoholic doesn't mean he is abusive. Men hate their jobs all the time and aren't abusive. Bipolar? Okay. Stressed? Who isn't! Do you see where I am going with this? Off the subject a bit, when someone commits a violent crime, they always report in the news about his possible motive. As human beings, we need to somehow make sense of things. If someone murders someone, do you think it makes the family of the victim feel better to know the murderer's motive? No. Except for self-defense, there really is no excuse for murder. Motive, if there is any, is irrelevant. The same is true of abuse. You could spend your whole life going round and round trying to figure out why. The truth is, the why doesn't matter. There are only two reasons why men commit abuse—because they want to do so and because they can. You want to know why. In many ways, you might feel like you need to know. But, if you could come up with a reason or a motive, it wouldn't help you. Maybe you believe that if you did this or that differently, he wouldn't have abused you. That is faulty thinking and won't help you get better. You didn't do anything to cause the abuse. No matter what you said, no matter what you did, you didn't deserve to be abused. You are the victim and it won't help you to know why he supposedly abused you. No matter what his reason, there is no excuse for abuse. You are not to blame.

She's bewildering as much as she is beguiling. That pretty mouth of hers says one thing, but those ocean eyes say another. She pulls a knife from my back only to say she'll bury another one there. She's confusing, captivating, and we're completely wrong for each other in all the right ways. She's a flame, and I'm going to get burned. An ocean and I'm going to drown. I run a hand over my face, wanting to blame my dehydration for whatever the hell is wrong with me. I've never been so affected by a single girl, and it's absurd, absolutely annoying. But then I grin, remembering her heartbeat hammering beneath my fingers, her breath catching every time I touch her, her eyes drinking in every smile and dimple she supposedly hates. The feeling of absolute annoyance for being so affected by someone is most definitely mutual, though I'm sure she'd deny it with a dagger to my throat. So very vicious, that one.

And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar… …Thus much of music, which makes a fair ending; for what should be the end of music if not the love of beauty?

The feeling of not being enough for someone, of knowing you would do anything for them and they not the same for you. I didn't want to, but I felt bad for her. I wanted to hate her, but I couldn't. I couldn't blame her for what she didn't know.

I don’t want to fucking leave. I don’t want to argue. I don’t want to hate myself. I don’t want to blame you. I’m tired of being angry at them, but damn them and…damn you, Cecelia, you were never supposed to know them, you were never,” his face twists with fury as my heart seizes, “you were…” He jerks me to stand, pulling me against him, anger rolling off his frame, anguish in his eyes. “Yours. I was always supposed to be yours,” I say as he nods and crushes me with his kiss.

Isn't it true that the world's entertainment scene is looking towards Africa? Now that the world loves African music genres like #Kalpop, Afrobeats, Benga, Bongo Flava, Kwaito, Lingala, Gengetone, among others, let's embrace being who we are. The cradle of life! A cradle of life blesses more than it curses. It LOVES and never HATES because it's understanding. But how can I LOVE you if I don't know how to LOVE myself? How can we be ONE if I still believe that my TRIBE is better than yours? [Africa Day Statement, May 25, 2021.]

Bouncing hurt. Our ego is the part of us that cares about our status and what people think, about always being better than and always being right. I think of my ego as my inner hustler. It’s always telling me to compare, prove, please, perfect, outperform, and compete. Our inner hustlers have very little tolerance for discomfort or self-reflection. The ego doesn’t own stories or want to write new endings; it denies emotion and hates curiosity. Instead, the ego uses stories as armor and alibis. The ego has a shame-based fear of being ordinary (which is how I define narcissism). The ego says, “Feelings are for losers and weaklings.” Avoiding truth and vulnerability are critical parts of the hustle. Like all good hustlers, our egos employ crews of ruffians in case we don’t comply with their demands. Anger, blame, and avoidance are the ego’s bouncers. When we get too close to recognizing an experience as an emotional one, these three spring into action. It’s much easier to say, “I don’t give a damn,” than it is to say, “I’m hurt.” The ego likes blaming, finding fault, making excuses, inflicting payback, and lashing out, all of which are ultimate forms of self-protection. The ego is also a fan of avoidance—assuring the offender that we’re fine, pretending that it doesn’t matter, that we’re impervious. We adopt a pose of indifference or stoicism, or we deflect with humor and cynicism. Whatever. Who cares?

I hate flakiness, and I blame the Facebook ‘Maybe’ button,” she tells me. “It’s not OK to say maybe and see if something better comes up. I believe in saying a solid yes or no because it’s polite. Saying no is hard but ultimately makes you a better person. For example, I’ve been invited to lots of parties (which is so nice!), but I am saying no to lots of them because I simply don’t have time. It’s not rude; it’s being honest.

Are you kidding? That’s exactly why I hate him! He knew that this was just the first step of a long war and we were going to need men like him to help win it. Fucking coward. Remember what I said about being beholden to your conscience? You can’t blame anyone else, not the plan’s architect, not your commanding officer, no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices. He knew this. That’s why he deserted us like we deserted those civilians. He saw the road ahead, a steep, treacherous mountain road. We’d all have to hike that road, each of us dragging the boulder of what we’d done behind us. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t shoulder the weight.

I’m not too sure what the name of the song was that he was playing when I came in, but whatever it was, he was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass. You should’ve heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would’ve puked. They went mad. They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes though I was terrific, I’d hate it. I wouldn’t even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddam closet. Anyway, when he was finished, and everybody was clapping their heads off, old Ernie turned around on his stool and gave this very phony, humble bow. Like as if he was a helluva humble guy, besides being a terrific piano player. It was very phony—I mean him being such a big snob and all. In a funny way, though, I felt sort of sorry for him when he was finished. I don’t even think he knows any more when he’s playing right or not. It isn’t all his fault. I partly blame all those dopes that clap their heads off—they’d foul up anybody, if you gave them a chance.

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men—friends, coworkers, strangers—giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much—no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version—maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”) I waited patiently—years—for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy. But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard girl. Men believed she existed—she wasn’t just a dreamgirl one in a million. Every girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren’t, then there was something wrong with you. But it’s tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it’s tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants. When I met Nick, I knew immediately that was what he wanted, and for him, I guess I was willing to try. I will accept my portion of blame. The thing is, I was crazy about him at first. I found him perversely exotic, a good ole Missouri boy. He was so damn nice to be around. He teased things out in me that I didn’t know existed: a lightness, a humor, an ease. It was as if he hollowed me out and filled me with feathers. He helped me be Cool

And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful: and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justify blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.

Everything I have, everything good in my life, I owe to the internet’s ability to empower people like me, people who wouldn’t have a voice without it. All the garbage that is thrown at us is enabled by this broken machine, yet I firmly believe that the internet is also the best tool we have to address the problem. To the uninitiated, it might seem easy to blame the very things that make the internet great for the rampant abuse, but that reaction would be alarmist and simply incorrect. One might see the relative anonymity of the online world as something that allows people to do heinous things to one another without accountability, but anonymity is also what can give isolated teenagers like I was the ability to talk about their queerness without fear of being outed.

I think about you all the time. I hear your voice in my head, I rehearse conversations with you, I talk to myself, and imagine I’m talking to you. And I wish you felt like this about me, but I know you don’t and I don’t think you ever will. I think you’re happy giving people your scraps. I think that’s easy for you, and I don’t blame you, because I hate being like this, and I wish I was more like you.

I think about you all the time. I hear your voice in my head, I rehearse conversations with you, I talk to myself, and imagine I’m talking to you. And I wish you felt like this about me, but I know you don’t and I don’t think you ever will. I think you’re happy giving people your scraps. I think that’s easy for you, and I don’t blame you, because I hate being like this, and I wish I was more like you." pg 168

In most Asian cultures, I learned, there is no reverence for the vampiric monster as there is in the West; most bloodsucking things are women, and their actions - be it sin in a past life, a pact with a demon, a jealous or unstable personality - are all blamed for their monstrous states. Maybe my mum hated herself for not being able to hold on to her humanity; maybe she hated me for being the cause of her losing it.

Young children are for the most part just and moral. They love preachy stories because they do in fact understand that actions have consequences. Yet they turn to adults for the mercy and subtlety that they themselves can’t yet summon. And who can blame them? They are still little and vulnerable, uncompromising to a fault. . . . they want an adult’s protection from their own rough justice. This, I think, is the one true story of early childhood, the yin and yang of being a small person. It’s confusing emotional terrain for children to inhabit, and we must guide them gently through it. Is it intimacy you want, or freedom? Protection or power? Childhood is a kind of enslavement, but it’s a liberation, too. Young children’s emotions are all about this basic conflict. Feed me. Hold me. Comfort me. Fix me. I hate you! I can do it myself.

There can be no nobler training than that, he replied. And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognise and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar. Yes,

1)    The woman has intuitive feelings that she is at risk. 2)    At the inception of the relationship, the man accelerated the pace, prematurely placing on the agenda such things as commitment, living together, and marriage. 3)    He resolves conflict with intimidation, bullying, and violence. 4)    He is verbally abusive. 5)    He uses threats and intimidation as instruments of control or abuse. This includes threats to harm physically, to defame, to embarrass, to restrict freedom, to disclose secrets, to cut off support, to abandon, and to commit suicide. 6)    He breaks or strikes things in anger. He uses symbolic violence (tearing a wedding photo, marring a face in a photo, etc.). 7)    He has battered in prior relationships. 8)    He uses alcohol or drugs with adverse affects (memory loss, hostility, cruelty). 9)    He cites alcohol or drugs as an excuse or explanation for hostile or violent conduct (“That was the booze talking, not me; I got so drunk I was crazy”). 10)   His history includes police encounters for behavioral offenses (threats, stalking, assault, battery). 11)   There has been more than one incident of violent behavior (including vandalism, breaking things, throwing things). 12)   He uses money to control the activities, purchase, and behavior of his wife/partner. 13)   He becomes jealous of anyone or anything that takes her time away from the relationship; he keeps her on a “tight leash,” requires her to account for her time. 14)   He refuses to accept rejection. 15)   He expects the relationship to go on forever, perhaps using phrases like “together for life;” “always;” “no matter what.” 16)   He projects extreme emotions onto others (hate, love, jealousy, commitment) even when there is no evidence that would lead a reasonable person to perceive them. 17)   He minimizes incidents of abuse. 18)   He spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about his wife/partner and derives much of his identity from being her husband, lover, etc. 19)   He tries to enlist his wife’s friends or relatives in a campaign to keep or recover the relationship. 20)   He has inappropriately surveilled or followed his wife/partner. 21)   He believes others are out to get him. He believes that those around his wife/partner dislike him and encourage her to leave. 22)   He resists change and is described as inflexible, unwilling to compromise. 23)   He identifies with or compares himself to violent people in films, news stories, fiction, or history. He characterizes the violence of others as justified. 24)   He suffers mood swings or is sullen, angry, or depressed. 25)   He consistently blames others for problems of his own making; he refuses to take responsibility for the results of his actions. 26)   He refers to weapons as instruments of power, control, or revenge. 27)   Weapons are a substantial part of his persona; he has a gun or he talks about, jokes about, reads about, or collects weapons. 28)   He uses “male privilege” as a justification for his conduct (treats her like a servant, makes all the big decisions, acts like the “master of the house”). 29)   He experienced or witnessed violence as a child. 30)   His wife/partner fears he will injure or kill her. She has discussed this with others or has made plans to be carried out in the event of her death (e.g., designating someone to care for children).

...it takes great humility to find oneself unjustly condemned and be silent, and to do this is to imitate the Lord Who set us free from all our sins. ... The truly humble person will have a genuine desire to be thought little of, and persecuted, and condemned unjustly, even in serious matters. ... It is a great help to meditate upon the great gain which in any case this is bound to bring us, and to realize how, properly speaking, we can never be blamed unjustly, since we are always full of faults, and a just man falls seven times a day, so that it would be a falsehood for us to say we have no sin. If, then, we are not to blame for the thing that we are accused of, we are never wholly without blame in the way that our good Jesus was. ... Thou knowest, my Good, that if there is anything good in me it comes from no other hands than Thine own. For what is it to Thee, Lord, to give much instead of little? True, I do not deserve it, but neither have I deserved the favors which Thou hast shown me already. Can it be that I should wish a thing so evil as myself to be thought well of by anyone, when they have said such wicked things of Thee, Who art good above all other good? ... Do Thou give me light and make me truly to desire that all should hate me, since I have so often let Thee, Who hast loved me with such faithfulness. ... What does it matter to us if we are blamed by them all, provided we are without blame in the sight of the Lord? ...meditate upon what is real and upon what is not. ... Do you suppose, ... that, if you do not make excuses for yourself, there will not be someone else who will defend you? Remember how the Lord took the Magdalen's part in the Pharisee's house and also when her sister blamed her. He will not treat you as rigorously as He treated Himself: it was not until He was on the Cross that He had even a thief to defend Him. His Majesty, then, will put it into somebody's mind to defend you; if He does not, it will be because there is no need. ...be glad when you are blamed, and in due time you will see what profit you experience in your souls. For it is in this way that you will begin to gain freedom; soon you will not care if they speak ill or well of you; it will seem like someone else's business. ... So here: it becomes such a habit with us not to reply that it seems as if they are not addressing us at all. This may seem impossible to those of us who are very sensitive and not capable of great mortification. It is indeed difficult at first, but I know that, with the Lord's help, the gradual attainment of this freedom, and of renunciation and self-detachment, is quite possible.

Out country's messed up son. Mortally wounded. And I can't for the life of me se how we're going to heal it. Your generation can't do it. Even you're too old. The new ones coming along...that's where the hope lies, if there is any. We've got to acknowledge what we did to those people. But I don't think we ever will. People hate admitting guilt, but we can't blame it all on the Knoxes of the world. We're all guilty. Blacks are messed up, too...but how could they not be? White people fight this so hard because they know the truth in their bones. You know? You don't get that angry unless you know you're wrong.

Who in the world relies on me for anything? No one. I can blame myself, and I do, but I also think the failure is general. People our age used to get married and have children and conduct love affairs, and now everyone is still single at thirty and lives with housemates they never see. Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose, and almost ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another, but at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life. Of course if we all stay alone and practise celibacy and carefully police our personal boundaries, many problems will be avoided, but it seems we will also have almost nothing left that makes life worthwhile. I guess you could say the old ways of being together were wrong—they were!—and that we didn’t want to repeat old mistakes—we didn’t. But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it? I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing. And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.

In the stories of faith I grew up with, men were allowed a full range of emotion: King David, who calls on God to destroy his enemies. Absalom rising up against his father the king. Jonah stewing under his tree, looking out on the city God saved but he hates. Job crying out to God for his miserable fate. But the rage of good women in the Bible is all in the subtext. Nowhere is there an Eve angry for being removed from Eden and the loss of her two sons. Where is Esther, where is her horror and pain watching the genocide of her people? Or Ruth, who followed her miserable mother-in-law to a foreign land and had to listen to that lady bitching as if she felt nothing? The women allowed to have feelings in the Bible are always the villains. Michal sneering at David that he ought to put his clothes on and stop dancing like a naked fool. She is indicted for her words, but hadn’t she just been married, abandoned, and then taken back by this man? Used as a political pawn, then ignored for Bathsheba. Then there is Sarah, who beat her maidservant Hagar, blaming her for what should have rightly fallen on the shoulders of Abraham. And Job’s wife, who Biblical scholars condemn for telling her husband to curse God and die. But wasn’t she just wishing him a swift end to the suffering that they had walked through hand in hand?

Grateful! Good God! Am I never to get away from the bleat of that filmy adjective? I don’t want gratitude. I don’t want kindness. I don’t want sentimentality. I don’t even want love—I could make you give me that—of a sort. I want common honesty.’ ‘Do you? But that’s what I’ve always wanted—I don’t think it’s to be got.’ ‘Listen, Harriet. I do understand. I know you don’t want either to give or to take. You’ve tried being the giver, and you’ve found that the giver is always fooled. And you won’t be the taker, because that’s very difficult, and because you know that the taker always ends by hating the giver. You don’t want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.’ ‘That’s true. That’s the truest thing you ever said.’ ‘All right. I can respect that. Only you’ve got to play the game. Don’t force an emotional situation and then blame me for it.’ ‘But I don’t want any situation. I want to be left in peace.’ ‘Oh! but you are not a peaceful person. You’ll always make trouble. Why not fight it out on equal terms and enjoy it? Like Alan Breck, I’m a bonny fighter.’ ‘And you think you’re sure to win.’ ‘Not with my hands tied.’ ‘Oh!—well, all right. But it all sounds so dreary and exhausting,’ said Harriet, and burst idiotically into tears. ‘Good Heavens!’ said Wimsey, aghast. ‘Harriet! darling! angel! beast! vixen! don’t say that.’ He flung himself on his knees in a frenzy of remorse and agitation. ‘Call me anything you like, but not dreary! Not one of those things you find in clubs! Have this one, darling, it’s much larger and quite clean. Say you didn’t mean it! Great Scott! Have I been boring you interminably for eighteen months on end? A thing any right-minded woman would shudder at I know you once said that if anybody ever married me it would be for the sake of hearing me piffle on, but I expect that kind of thing palls after a bit. I’m babbling—I know I’m babbling. What on earth am I to do about it?’ ‘Ass! Oh, it’s not fair. You always make me laugh. I can’t fight—I’m so tired. You don’t seem to know what being tired is. Stop. Let go. I won’t be bullied. Thank God! there’s the telephone.

Solitude is the worst of punishments. It’s like waiting in the Death Row for your last supper and the final blow, the chair or gas or whatever. The utter act of capital punishment, except it’s lasting an eternity. You'd say being alone, single, can have an array of possibilities, positive sides. You'd argue when being approached with such a statement! You'd mention how good it feels to be independent, to have a free choice, not depending on anyone else's opinion. The space in your life, the remote in your hand that is not wrestled for, the cookies, still present in the jar, waiting for you to eat them. The wide bed and the covers just for your own pleasure and usage. I can see you throwing your arguments at me, fighting passionately since you strongly believe that what you say, is the truth. And then, the night falls, devouring your clearly visible assumptions and postulates, making some room for doubt and fright. You hear the silence that grows around you, feel it possessing you from the inside and you don't have time to brace yourself for what's coming. The horrid feeling of incompletion and senseless existence catch you with overpowering force, making your throat shrink and your mind tight. You're scared so much that all seems so dark and eerie. Then, you ask yourself whether it was really you who chose this, who decided upon this unbearable state of utter loneliness. The answer is usually the same. It is always you, always me. Not consciously, but by our choices, we become the pariahs of our own pitiful life. The untouchables. We are the hater and the hated, the victim and the perpetrator in one body, lying to ourselves, blaming everybody else but us for each second of this unthinkable hell, praying in silence to be saved, to be spared from pain and suffering. In the end, you’d rather go barefoot through glowing coals than admit that you’re too scared to ask for love.

You are culpable in this too, Tracy. You raised your daughter without morals or an understanding of accountability. You failed her with your spoiling and blaming, and especially the lack of hard truths. She needs to face the consequences of her actions, or she won’t learn.” Mom seemed to be venting the last decade of frustration in one hit. “Raising a child needs care. It can’t all be wonderful moments; discipline and guidance are a priority right next to love and care. Brie appears to have completely missed the lessons in life regarding other people; I’d hate to imagine her understanding of her own safety. Everyone has the right to be safe in their own skin without the threat of force being used against them. God knows we’ve been trying to teach our daughters these things, but where in this did any of us include the rights of men as part of that? Gender aside, violating another person is a crime in need of punishment, and you should be working to see her take responsibility for what she’s done.

Racism was a constant presence and absence in the Obama White House. We didn’t talk about it much. We didn’t need to—it was always there, everywhere, like white noise. It was there when Obama said that it was stupid for a black professor to be arrested in his own home and got criticized for days while the white police officer was turned into a victim. It was there when a white Southern member of Congress yelled “You lie!” at Obama while he addressed a joint session of Congress. It was there when a New York reality show star built an entire political brand on the idea that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, an idea that was covered as national news for months and is still believed by a majority of Republicans. It was there in the way Obama was talked about in the right-wing media, which spent eight years insisting that he hated America, disparaging his every move, inventing scandals where there were none, attacking him for any time that he took off from work. It was there in the social media messages I got that called him a Kenyan monkey, a boy, a Muslim. And it was there in the refusal of Republicans in Congress to work with him for eight full years, something that Obama was also blamed for no matter what he did. One time, Obama invited congressional Republicans to attend a screening of Lincoln in the White House movie theater—a Steven Spielberg film about how Abraham Lincoln worked with Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Not one of them came. Obama didn’t talk about it much. Every now and then, he’d show flashes of dark humor in practicing the answer he could give on a particular topic. What do you think it will take for these protests to stop? “Cops need to stop shooting unarmed black folks.” Why do you think you have failed to bring the country together? “Because my being president appears to have literally driven some white people insane.” Do you think some of the opposition you face is about race? “Yes! Of course! Next question.” But he was guarded in public. When he was asked if racism informed the strident opposition to his presidency, he’d carefully ascribe it to other factors.

Story time. In September of 1869, there was a terrible fire at the Avondale coal mine near Plymouth, Pennsylvania. Over 100 coal miners lost their lives. Horrific conditions and safety standards were blamed for the disaster. It wasn’t the first accident. Hundreds of miners died in these mines every year. And those that didn’t, lived in squalor. Children as young as eight worked day in and out. They broke their bodies and gave their lives for nothing but scraps. That day of the fire, as thousands of workers and family members gathered outside the mine to watch the bodies of their friends and loved ones brought to the surface, a man named John Siney stood atop one of the carts and shouted to the crowd: Men, if you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country, but do not longer consent to die, like rats in a trap, for those who have no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with. That day, thousands of coal miners came together to unionize. That organization, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, managed to fight, for a few years at least, to raise safety standards for the mines by calling strikes and attempting to force safety legislation. ... Until 1875, when the union was obliterated by the mine owners. Why was the union broken so easily? Because they were out in the open. They were playing by the rules. How can you win a deliberately unfair game when the rules are written by your opponent? The answer is you can’t. You will never win. Not as long as you follow their arbitrary guidelines. This is a new lesson to me. She’s been teaching me so many things, about who I am. About what I am. What I really am. About what must be done. Anyway, during this same time, it is alleged a separate, more militant group of individuals had formed in secret. The Molly Maguires. Named after a widow in Ireland who fought against predatory landlords, the coal workers of Pennsylvania became something a little more proactive, supposedly assassinating over two dozen coal mine supervisors and managers. ... Until Pinkerton agents, hired by the same mine owners, infiltrated the group and discovered their identities. Several of the alleged Mollies ended up publicly hanged. Others disappeared. You get the picture. So, that’s another type of secret society. The yeah-we’re-terrorists-but-we-strongly-feel-we’re-justified-and-fuck-you-if-you-don’t-agree society. So, what’s the moral of this little history lesson? This sort of thing happens all day, every day across the universe. It happens in Big Ways, and it happens in little ways, too. The strong stomp on the weak. The weak fight back, usually within the boundaries of the rat trap they find themselves confined. They almost always remain firmly stomped. But sometimes, the weak gather in secret. They make plans. They work outside the system to effect change. Like the Mollies, they usually end up just as stomped as everyone else. But that’s just life. At least they fucking tried. They died with their boots on, as much as I hate that expression. They died with their boots on for their people, their family, not for some rich, nameless organization that gives no shits whether they live or die. Or go extinct. Or are trapped for a millennia after they’re done being used. In my opinion, that’s the only type of society that’s worth joining, worth fighting for. Sure, you’re probably gonna die. But if you find yourself in such a position where such an organization is necessary, what do you have to lose? How can you look at yourself if you don’t do everything you can? And that brings us to the door you’re standing in front of right now. What does all this have to do with what you’re going to find on the other side? Nothing!

was my first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s “party of the working man”—the Democrats—weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation. Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement. Others cite religious faith and the hold that social conservatism has on evangelicals in that region. A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s. As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”20 At around that time, our neighbor—one of Mamaw and Papaw’s oldest friends—registered the house next to ours for Section 8. Section 8 is a government program that offers low-income residents a voucher to rent housing. Mamaw’s friend had little luck renting his property, but when he qualified his house for the Section 8 voucher, he virtually assured that would change. Mamaw saw it as a betrayal, ensuring that “bad” people would move into the neighborhood and drive down property values. Despite our efforts to draw bright lines between the working and nonworking poor, Mamaw and I recognized that we shared a lot in common with those whom we thought gave our people a bad name. Those Section 8 recipients looked a lot like us. The matriarch of the first family to move in next door was born in Kentucky but moved north at a young age as her parents sought a better life. She’d gotten involved with a couple of men, each of whom had left her with a child but no support. She was nice, and so were her kids. But the drugs and the late-night fighting revealed troubles that too many hillbilly transplants knew too well. Confronted with such a realization of her own family’s struggle, Mamaw grew frustrated and angry. From that anger sprang Bonnie Vance the social policy expert: “She’s a lazy whore, but she wouldn’t be if she was forced to get a job”; “I hate those fuckers for giving these people the money to move into our neighborhood.” She’d rant against the people we’d see in the grocery store: “I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.

We walk around inside that house like everything is okay, but it’s not, Quinn. We’ve been broken for years and I have no idea how to fix us. I find solutions. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at. But I have no idea how to solve me and you. Every day I come home, hoping things will be better. But you can’t even stand to be in the same room with me. You hate it when I touch you. You hate it when I talk to you. I pretend not to notice the things you don’t want me to notice because I don’t want you to hurt more than you already do.” He releases a rush of air. “I am not blaming you for what I did. It’s my fault. I did that. I fucked up. But I didn’t fuck up because I was attracted to her. I fucked up because I miss you. Every day, I miss you. When I’m at work, I miss you. When I’m home, I miss you. When you’re next to me in bed, I miss you. When I’m inside you, I miss you.” Graham presses his mouth to mine. I can taste his tears. Or maybe they’re my tears. He pulls back and presses his forehead to mine. “I miss you, Quinn. So much. You’re right here, but you aren’t. I don’t know where you went or when you left, but I have no idea how to bring you back. I am so alone. We live together. We eat together. We sleep together. But I have never felt more alone in my entire life.” Graham releases me and falls back against his seat. He rests his elbow against the window, covering his face as he tries to compose himself. He’s more broken than I’ve ever seen him in all the years I’ve known him. And I’m the one slowly tearing him down. I’m making him unrecognizable. I’ve strung him along by allowing him to believe there’s hope that I’ll eventually change. That I’ll miraculously turn back into the woman he fell in love with. But I can’t change. We are who our circumstances turn us into. “Graham.” I wipe at my face with my shirt. He’s quiet, but he eventually looks at me with his sad, heartbroken eyes. “I haven’t gone anywhere. I’ve been here this whole time. But you can’t see me because you’re still searching for someone I used to be. I’m sorry I’m no longer who I was back then. Maybe I’ll get better. Maybe I won’t. But a good husband loves his wife through the good and the bad times. A good husband stands at his wife’s side through sickness and health, Graham. A good husband- a husband who truly loves his wife - wouldn’t cheat on her and then blame his infidelity on the fact that he’s lonely.” Graham’s expression doesn’t change. He’s as still as a statue. The only thing that moves is his jaw as he works it back and forth. And then his eyes narrow and he tilts his head. “You don’t think I love you, Quinn?” “I know you used to. But I don’t think you love the person I’ve become.” Graham sits up straight. He leans forward, looking me hard in the eye. His words are clipped as he speaks. “I have loved you every single second of every day since the moment I laid eyes on you. I love you more now than I did the day I married you. I love you, Quinn. I fucking love you!” He opens his car door, gets out and then slams it shut with all his strength. The whole car shakes. He walks toward the house, but before he makes it to the front door, he spins around and points at me angrily. “I love you, Quinn!” He’s shouting the words. He’s angry. So angry. He walks toward his car and kicks at the front bumper with his bare foot. He kicks and he kicks and he kicks and then pauses to scream it at me again. “I love you!” He slams his fist against the top of his car, over and over, until he finally collapses against the hood, his head buried in his arms. He remains in this position for an entire minute, the only thing moving is the subtle shaking of his shoulders. I don’t move. I don’t even think I breathe. Graham finally pushes off the hood and uses his shirt to wipe at his eyes. He looks at me, completely defeated. “I love you,” he says quietly, shaking his head. “I always have. No matter how much you wish I didn’t.

He was known by three names. The official records have the first one: Marcos Maria Ribeira. And his official data. Born 1929. Died 1970. Worked in the steel foundry. Perfect safety record. Never arrested. A wife, six children. A model citizen, because he never did anything bad enough to go on the public record. The second name he had was Marcao. Big Marcos. Because he was a giant of a man. Reached his adult size early in his life. How old was he when he reached two meters? Eleven? Definitely by the time he was twelve. His size and strength made him valuable in the foundry,where the lots of steel are so small that much of the work is controlled by hand and strength matters. People's lives depended on Marcao's strength. His third name was Cao. Dog. That was the name you used for him when you heard his wife, Novinha, had another black eye, walked with a limp, had stitches in her lip. He was an animal to do that to her. Not that any of you liked Novinha. Not that cold woman who never gave any of you good morning. But she was smaller than he was, and she was the mother of his children, and when he beat her, he deserved the name of Cao. Tell me, is this the man you knew? Spent more hours in the bars than anyone but never made any friends there, never the camaraderie of alcohol for him. You couldn't even tell how much he had been drinking. He was surly and short-tempered before he had a drink and he was surly and short-tempered right before he passed out-nobody could tell the difference. You never heard of him having a friend, and none of you was ever glad to see him come into a room. That's the man you knew, most of you. Cao. Hardly a man at all. A few men, the men from the foundry in Bairro das Fabricados, knew him as a strong arm as they could trust. They knew he never said he could do more than he could do and he always did what he said he would do. You could count on him. So, within the walls of the foundry, he had their respect. But when you walked out of the door, you treated him like everybody else-ignored him, thought little of him. Some of you also know something else that you never talk about much. You know you gave him the name Cao long before he earned it. You were ten, eleven, twelve years old. Little boys. He grew so tall. It made you ashamed to be near him. And afraid, because he made you feel helpless. So you handled him the way human beings always handle things that are bigger than they are. You banded together. Like hunters trying to bring down a mastodon. Like bullfighters trying to weaken a giant bull to prepare it for the kill. Pokes, taunts, teases. Keep him turning around. He can't guess where the next blow was coming from. Prick him with barbs that stay under his skin. Weaken him with pain. Madden him. Because big as he is, you can make him do things. You can make him yell. You can make him run. You can make him cry. See? He's weaker than you after all. There's no blame in this. You were children then, and children are cruel without knowing better. You wouldn't do that now. But now that I've reminded you, you can clearly see an answer. You called him a dog, so he became one. For the rest of his life, hurting helpless people. Beating his wife. Speaking so cruelly and abusively to his son, Miro, that it drove the boy out of his house. He was acting the way you treated him, becoming what you told him he was. But the easy answer isn't true. Your torments didn't make him violent - they made him sullen. And when you grew out of tormenting him, he grew out of hating you. He wasn't one to bear a grudge. His anger cooled and turned into suspicion. He knew you despised him; he learned to live without you. In peace. So how did he become the cruel man you knew him to be? Think a moment. Who was it that tasted his cruelty? His wife. His children. Some people beat their wife and children because they lust for power, but are too weak or stupid to win power in the world.

It has been said that silence is a powerful weapon; in a quite different sense, it has a terrible power when wielded by those who are loved. It increases the anxiety of the one who waits. Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as the thing that is keeping us apart, and what greater barrier is there than silence? It has been said, too, that silence is torture, capable of driving the man condemned to it in a prison cell to madness. But what an even greater torture it is, greater than having to keep silent, to endure the silence of the person one loves! Robert asked himself: “What can she be doing, to stay silent like this? Is it that she’s being unfaithful to me?” And again: “What have I done to make her keep so silent? Perhaps she hates me, and will go on hating me forever.” And he blamed himself for it. So silence was in fact driving him mad, with jealousy and remorse. More cruel than the silence of the prison cell, the silence he endured was its own kind of prison. An intangible kind of enclosure, perhaps, but an impenetrable one, this segment of empty atmosphere between them, through which the visual rays of the abandoned lover cannot pass. Is there a more terrible form of illumination than silence, which casts its light on not one absent love but a thousand, each one involved in some new act of betrayal? Occasionally, in sudden moments of diminished stress, Robert would imagine that this silence was about to be broken, that a letter from her was on its way.

Hear that? Living skulls! What are we doing here? What war at Troy? Does anyone care? Gods of love and hate! Aren't they the same god? All of us, all our lives, searching for the one perfect enemy- you, me, Helen, Paris, Menelaos, all those crazy Greeks! all those hapless Trojans! my dear beloved Jack! Jack and I fought all the time. I remember almost nothing but the fights - every fight a war to end all wars, you know how it goes, a righteous war, a final war, the worst fight you've ever had, you can't do this again, this time you'll get things straight one way or the other or it's over, he'll see what you mean, see you're right, fights aren't about anything except being right, are they? once and for all. You feel old. Wrong. Clumsy. You sit in two chairs on the porch. Or the kitchen. Or the front hall. Hell arrives. It's as if the war was already there, waiting, the two of you poured into it like wet concrete. The chairs you sit in are the wrong chairs, they're the chairs you never sit in because they're so uncomfortable, you keep thinking you should move but you don't, your neck hurts, you hate your neck, evening closes in. Birds move about the yard. Hell yawns. War pours out of both of you, steaming and stinking. You rush backward from it and become children, every still sentence slamming you back into the child you still are, every sentence not what you meant to say at all but the meaning keeps flaring and contracting, as sparks drop on gasoline, Fuckshit this! Fuckshit that! no reason to live. You're getting vertigo. He's being despicable. Your mother was like this. Stop whimpering. No use asking, What is this about? Don't leave the room. I have to leave the room. Breathless, blaming, I'm not blaming! How is this not blaming! Hours pass or do they. You say the same things or are they different things? Hell smells stale. Fights aren't about anything, fights are about themselves. You're stiff. You hate these chairs. Nothing is resolved. It is too dark to see. You both go to bed and doze slightly, touching slightly. In the night a nightmare. Some giant bird, or insect, some flapping thing, trying to settle on the back of your neck, you can't see what it is or get it off. Pure fear. Scream unearthly. He jerks you awake. Oh sweetie, he says. He is using his inside voice, his most inside voice. The distance between that voice and the fight voice measures your whole world. How can a voice change so. You are saved. He has saved you. He sees you saved. An easement occurs, as night dew on leaves. And yet (you think suddenly) you yourself do not possess sort of inside voice - no wonder he's lonely. You this cannot offer this refuge, cannot save him, not ever, and, although physiological in origin, or genetic, or who knows, you understand the lack is felt by him as a turning away. No one can heal this. You both decide without words to just - skip it. You grip one another. In the night, in the silence, the grip slowly loosens and silence washes you out somewhere onto a shore of sleep. Morning arrives. Troy is still there. You hear from below the clatter of everyone putting on their armour. You go to the window.

Ram finally stood up and said in a voice that was clear and soothing, ‘Know this, Ayodhya is not mine to give or Bharata’s to take; Ayodhya is the responsibility of the Raghu clan, not our property. It will be injustice if the kings of the Raghu clan do not keep their word, it will be injustice if the wishes of Kaikeyi are not fulfilled. My father promised to fulfil her wishes and he is obliged to fulfil them, as am I. Do not blame her for asking what is due to her. Yes, the event is unfortunate but it is but one event in our lives; we can call it a tragedy if we wish. Blaming helps no one; let us take responsibility for it. For nothing in life happens spontaneously: it is the result of past actions. This moment is as it is supposed to be. I am repaying the debt of the past and so are you. We cannot choose the circumstances of our life, but we can make our choices. I have chosen to be true to my clan. My wife has chosen to be true to her role as my wife. My brother has chosen to be true to his feelings. Allow us our choices. Come to terms with our decisions. You are angry not with the queen or her son, or the king, you are angry that life has not turned out the way you thought it would. In a moment, the world you so took for granted has collapsed. Expand your mind and understand that the pain comes from your assumptions and expectations. Choose love over hate, by accepting the fears and fragilities of humanity that lead to situations such as these. This moment is the outcome of some curse, or maybe it is a boon in waiting. Who knows? Varuna has a thousand eyes, Indra a hundred, you and I, only two.

Your Honor, it is over now. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn’t ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did not for reasons of hate; I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now, I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness, and now I have some peace. I know how much harm I have caused. I tried to do the best I could after the arrest to make amends, but no matter what I did, I could not undo the terrible harm I have caused. I feel so bad for what I did to those poor families, and I understand their rightful hate. “I decided to go through with this trial for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was to let the world know that these were not hate crimes. I wanted the world and Milwaukee, which I deeply hurt, to know the truth of what I did. I didn’t want unanswered questions. All the questions have now been answered. I wanted to find out just what it was that caused me to be so bad and evil. But most of all, Mr. Boyle and I decided that maybe there was a way for us to tell the world that if there are people out there with these disorders, maybe they can get some help before they end up being hurt or hurting someone. I think the trial did that. I should have stayed with God. I tried and failed, and created a holocaust. Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do. I take all the blame for what I did. I hurt so many people and I am sorry. In closing, I just want to say that I hope God has forgiven me. I know society will never be able to forgive me. I ask for no consideration.

There’s a slogan in the mahayana1 teachings that says, “Drive all blames into oneself.” The essence of this slogan is, “When it hurts so bad, it’s because I am hanging on so tight.” It’s not saying that we should beat ourselves up. It’s not advocating martyrdom. What it implies is that pain comes from holding so tightly to having it our own way and that one of the main exits we take when we find ourselves uncomfortable, when we find ourselves in an unwanted situation or an unwanted place, is to blame. We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us, and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don’t like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect our hearts, to try to protect what is soft and open and tender in ourselves. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground. This slogan is a helpful and interesting suggestion that we could begin to shift that deep-seated, ancient, habitual tendency to hang on to having everything on our own terms. The way to start would be, first, when we feel the tendency to blame, to try to get in touch with what it feels like to be holding on to ourselves so tightly. What does it feel like to blame? How does it feel to reject? What does it feel like to hate? What does it feel like to be righteously indignant? In each of us, there’s a lot of softness, a lot of heart. Touching that soft spot has to be the starting place. This is what compassion is all about. When we stop blaming long enough to give ourselves an open space in which to feel our soft spot, it’s as if we’re reaching down to touch a large wound that lies right underneath

Why Does He Do That? That's the number one question, isn't it? Maybe it's his drinking, you say. Maybe it's his learning disabilities. It's his job; he hates it. He's stressed. I think he's bipolar. It's his mother's fault; she spoiled him rotten. It's the drugs. If only he didn't use. It's his temper. He's selfish. It's the pornography; he's obsessed. The list could go on and on. You could spend many years trying to pinpoint it and never get a definite answer. The fact is, many people have these problems and they aren't abusive. Just because someone is an alcoholic doesn't mean he is abusive. Men hate their jobs all the time and aren't abusive. Bipolar? Okay. Stressed? Who isn't! Do you see where I am going with this? Off the subject a bit, when someone commits a violent crime, they always report in the news about his possible motive. As human beings, we need to somehow make sense of things. If someone murders someone, do you think it makes the family of the victim feel better to know the murderer's motive? No. Except for self-defense, there really is no excuse for murder. Motive, if there is any, is irrelevant. The same is true of abuse. You could spend your whole life going round and round trying to figure out why. The truth is, the why doesn't matter. There are only two reasons why men commit abuse—because they want to do so and because they can. You want to know why. In many ways, you might feel like you need to know. But, if you could come up with a reason or a motive, it wouldn't help you. Maybe you believe that if you did this or that differently, he wouldn't have abused you. That is faulty thinking and won't help you get better. You didn't do anything to cause the abuse. No matter what you said, no matter what you did, you didn't deserve to be abused. You are the victim and it won't help you to know why he supposedly abused you. No matter what his reason, there is no excuse for abuse. You are not to blame. —Beth Praed

You need to forgive me. Now that really blew her away. Forgive God? This idea is going to cause some readers to freak out. Just listen for a moment. If you are holding something in your heart against Jesus—the loss of someone you love, a painful memory from your past, simply the way your life has turned out—if you are holding that against Jesus, well, then, it is between you and Jesus. And no amount of ignoring it or being faithful in other areas of your life is going to make it go away. In order to move forward, you are going to need to forgive Jesus for whatever these things are. “But Jesus doesn’t need our forgiveness!” you protest. I didn’t say he did. I said that you need to forgive Jesus—you need it. Let me be clear: To forgive a person, we pardon a wrong done to us; “Forgiving” Jesus means to release the hurt and resentment we hold against him. This comes before understanding. We don’t often know why things have happened the way they have in our lives. What we do know is that we were hurt, and part of that hurt is toward Jesus, because in our hearts we believe he let it happen. Again, this is not the time for sifting theological nuances, but this is why it is so important for you to look at the world the way Jesus did—as a vicious battle with evil. When you understand you have an enemy that has hated your guts ever since you were a child, it will help you not to blame this stuff on God. Anyhow, the facts are it happened, we are hurt that it happened, and part of us believes Jesus should have done something about it and didn’t. That is why we need to “forgive” him. We do so in order that this part of us can draw near him again, and receive his love. Perhaps part of the fruit of that restoration will be that Jesus will then be able to explain to us why things happened the way they did. This is often the case. But whether we receive this or not, we know we need Jesus far more than we need understanding. And so we forgive—meaning, we release the offense we feel towards him.

It was true. They’d been close enough to recognize him. But they’d hunted down him and Sejanus — Sejanus, who’d treated the tributes so well, fed them, defended them, given them last rites! — even though they could have used that opportunity to kill one another. “I think I underestimated how much they hate us,” said Coriolanus. “And when you realized that, what was your response?” she asked. He thought back to Bobbin, to the escape, to the tributes’ bloodlust even after he’d cleared the bars. “I wanted them dead. I wanted every one of them dead.” Dr. Gaul nodded. “Well, mission accomplished with that little one from Eight. You beat him to a pulp. Have to make up some story for that buffoon Flickerman to tell in the morning. But what a wonderful opportunity for you. Transformative.” “Was it?” Coriolanus remembered the sickening thuds of his board against Bobbin. So he had what? Murdered the boy? No, not that. It was an open-and-shut case of self-defense. But what, then? He had killed him, certainly. There would never be any erasing that. No regaining that innocence. He had taken human life. “Wasn’t it? More than I could’ve hoped. I needed you to get Sejanus out of the arena, of course, but I wanted you to taste that as well,” she said. “Even if it killed me?” asked Coriolanus. “Without the threat of death, it wouldn’t have been much of a lesson,” said Dr. Gaul. “What happened in the arena? That’s humanity undressed. The tributes. And you, too. How quickly civilization disappears. All your fine manners, education, family background, everything you pride yourself on, stripped away in the blink of an eye, revealing everything you actually are. A boy with a club who beats another boy to death. That’s mankind in its natural state.” The idea, laid out as such, shocked him, but he attempted a laugh. “Are we really as bad as all that?” “I would say yes, absolutely. But it’s a matter of personal opinion.” Dr. Gaul pulled a roll of gauze from the pocket of her lab coat. “What do you think?” “I think I wouldn’t have beaten anyone to death if you hadn’t stuck me in that arena!” he retorted. “You can blame it on the circumstances, the environment, but you made the choices you made, no one else. It’s a lot to take in all at once, but it’s essential that you make an effort to answer that question. Who are human beings? Because who we are determines the type of governing we need. Later on, I hope you can reflect and be honest with yourself about what you learned tonight.

A man surrounded by genetic damage cannot help but mimic it with his own behavior,” Zoe says. “Matthew, David wants to set up a meeting with your supervisor to discuss one of the serum developments. Last time Alan completely forgot about it, so I was wondering if you could escort him.” “Sure,” Matthew says without looking away from his computer. “I’ll get him to give me a time.” “Lovely. Well, I have to go--I hope that answered your question, Tris.” She smiles at me and slips out the door. I sit hunched, with my elbows on my knees. Marcus was Divergent--genetically pure, just like me. But I don’t accept that he was a bad person because he was surrounded by genetically damaged people. So was I. So was Uriah. So was my mother. But none of us lashed out at our loved ones. “Her argument has a few holes in it, doesn’t it,” says Matthew. He’s watching me from behind his desk, tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Yeah,” I say. “Some of the people here want to blame genetic damage for everything,” he says. “It’s easier for them to accept than the truth, which is that they can’t know everything about people and why they act the way they do.” “Everyone has to blame something for the way the world is,” I say. “For my father it was the Erudite.” “I probably shouldn’t tell you that the Erudite were always my favorite, then,” Matthew says, smiling a little. “Really?” I straighten. “Why?” “I don’t know, I guess I agree with them. That if everyone would just keep learning about the world around them, they would have far fewer problems.” “I’ve been wary of them my whole life,” I say, resting my chin on my hand. “My father hated the Erudite, so I learned to hate them too, and everything they did with their time. Only now I’m thinking he was wrong. Or just…biased.” “About the Erudite or about learning?” I shrug. “Both. So many of the Erudite helped me when I didn’t ask them to.” Will, Fernando, Cara--all Erudite, all some of the best people I’ve known, however briefly. “They were so focused on making the world a better place.” I shake my head. “What Jeanine did has nothing to do with a thirst for knowledge leading to a thirst for power, like my father told me, and everything to do with her being terrified of how big the world is and how powerless that made her. Maybe it was the Dauntless who had it right.” “There’s an old phrase,” Matthew says. “Knowledge is power. Power to do evil, like Jeanine…or power to do good, like what we’re doing. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil.

This night is going well. "Hello there." I speak too soon. Dunstan enters, his two cronies behind him. Everyone standing around goes quiet. I flinch, but not for me; he's gazing at Ivy like a lion at a piece of meat. Ivy just keeps grinning. "And may I say you are the prettiest girl I've seen all night," Dunstan says, not noticing the fact Ivy's already taken. Ivy stares down at her feet, a pale blush the color of pink roses brushed across her cheeks. "You don't mean that," she whispers, not knowing she's accidentally flirting. "I really do," Dunstan continues in his oily, supposedly charming voice, and I roll my eyes. I want to pull Ivy away, but if I do, Dunstan will notice me. And without Melanie breathing down his neck, who knows what he'll try to pull? "So what's your name, beautiful?" Ivy blush deepens and i feel my nails dig into my skin. I'm the one whose supposed to tell her she's pretty, not this jerk. "My name is Ivy," Ivy replies. "Ivy. I like it. It suits you." I feel an arm on my shoulder and turning around, I see Aidan holding me back. Unconsciously, I've stepped forward, ready to challenge him. "So what is your name?" Ivy asks, still shyly peering down at her shoeless feet. Acting all surprised he got asked this, Dunstan runs a hand through his hair. "My name is Dunstan." Ivy's flush instantly vanishes, the corners of her mouth turns down, and her eyebrows knit together. "Dunstan? This is your name?" Quiet as she's being, I know there's anger there. I'd hate to be the recipient of this tone. But Dunstan the egotistical baboon butt isn't aware of the change. "Yep, that's me." "What is your last name?" I feel someone shaking. Aidan's still hanging on to me, and he's nervous, too. Dunstan still doesn't detect her malice. "Why, my last name's Lebelle. Dunstan Lebelle." He chuckles. "Perhaps you've heard of me?" "Oh yes," Ivy hisses, suddenly radiating ferocious fury. "I've heard much about the boy who nearly got Rylan Forester killed." Even with blaring music in the next room, you can hear a pin drop throughout the kitchen as everyone goes quiet, having lost all ability to talk due to flapping jaws. Someone whistles. "Excuse me?" Dunstan sounds like he can't believe what he's hearing. "You heard me." Ivy glares, knowing she has him caught. "You pushed Rylan into the swamp where the alligator attacked him. Sure, you can blame the alligator, but when you really think about, if you had not pushed him in, Rylan wouldn't have nearly died. Who, by the way," Ivy steps back, clasping my free hand in hers, "happens to be my friend and my date." Everyone bursts into titters—no one has ever spoken to Dustan Lebelle like that—as Dunstan stares at me wide-eyed, finally taking in my existence. But before he can do anything, Ivy pulls my hand. "We're leaving," she declares, giving Dunstan one last stink eye. And with her nose in the air and me following, Ivy boldly walks right out the back door.

wanted to rail at Lou, blame her for getting under his skin, for making him fall in love with her. He wanted to hate her for being the answer to his dream, then snatching it out of his grasp. Over the past few days, his “Honey, I’m home” dream had begun to shape into a reality. The toddler he’d dreamed of

Did I know that I had begun my life in a totalitarian state? How could I have? I didn't even realize I was being treated in a cruel and confusing way, something I would never have dreamed of suggesting. So rather than question my mother's behavior, I cast doubt on the rightness of my own feeling that I was being unjustly treated. As I had no point of comparison of her behavior with that of other mothers, and as she constantly portrayed herself as the embodiment of duty and self-sacrifice, I had no choice but to believe her. And, anyway, I had to believe her. To have realized the truth would have killed me. Therefore, it had to be my wickedness that was to blame when Mother didn't speak to me, when she refused to answer my questions and ignored my pleas for clarification, when she avoided the slightest eye contact with me and returned my love with coldness. If Mother hates me, reasoned the child, then I must be hateful.

All of those years I looked upon black people in the ghetto with disgust and blamed them for turning once-nice neighborhoods into shit, I had of course never stopped to think what it would be like to be born into those conditions. I had lived in those conditions myself, but I did so by choice, spurning the privilege of being born white and middle-class to take on a twisted mission. Listening to Ruth I was struck by an empathy not only for her and her children but for all people living in impoverished drug-riddled violent places. What right did I ever have to pass judgment on people who endure waking nightmares every day? I had no right whatsoever, but back in the day that didn't matter because I didn't look upon Ruth, Mary, Epossi, or anyone else who wasn't "white" as people. I saw them as threats that must be eliminated. Now, thanks to Charlie Dee's English 201, I had learned that they were people indeed, ones that were more genuine and caring than the superfluous suburb-dwellers that I had grown up with. They were people who not only prevailed against imposing odds on a daily basis just to eat and keep warm, but also people who when presented with my miserable past chose to forgive me.

I HATE your family!” The audience started laughing. “I HATE your daddy for thinking she looked good that night! I HATE your momma for knowing what he likes. I HATE your daddy for blowing his top. I HATE your momma for ovulating that month. I HATE that the timing of their love was so perfect that night that nine months later you were born into this world. I HATE your father for not sticking it out, and being the first man to break your heart and dooming the rest of his kind. I HATE your momma for not teaching you what a GOOD man looks like. How to LOVE him, how to KEEP him, HOW TO BE FAITHFUL! I HATE your family! I have to HATE them because its hard to HATE you! I LOVED you and wanted our love to last forever and ever. But who could succeed when the odds were stacked so high against us. They say young love never last, but I didn’t want to believe that! I knew we would last, I knew we would soar! Shot down in our prime our love is now a statistic. I gotta blame someone and I know it wasn’t me. So I blame your family!

hate being fat. I hate the way people look at me, or don’t. I hate being a joke; I hate the disorienting limbo between too visible and invisible; I hate the way that complete strangers waste my life out of supposed concern for my death. I hate knowing that if I did die of a condition that correlates with weight, a certain subset of people would feel their prejudices validated, and some would outright celebrate. I also love being fat. The breadth of my shoulders makes me feel safe. I am unassailable. I intimidate. I am a polar icebreaker. I walk and climb and lift things, I can open your jar, I can absorb blows—literal and metaphorical—meant for other women, smaller women, breakable women, women who need me. My bones feel like iron—heavy, but strong. I used to say that being fat in our culture was like drowning (in hate, in blame, in your own tissue), but lately I think it’s more like burning. After three decades in the fire, my iron bones are steel.

He wasn't like this when I knew him." "Yes, he was," Mr Crepsley disagreed. "He just had not grown into his true evil self yet. He was born bad, as certain people are. Humans will tell you that everybody can be helped, that everyone has a choice. In my experience, that is not so. Good people can sometimes choose badness, but bad people cannot choose good." "I don't believe that," Harkat said softly. "I think good and evil exist...in all of us. We might be born leaning more towards...one than the other, but the choice is there. It has to be. Otherwise, we're mere...puppets of fate." "Perhaps," Mr Crepsley grunted. "Many see it as you do. But I do not think so. Most are born with the freedom of choice. But there are those who defy the rules, who are wicked from the beginning. Maybe they are puppets of fate, born that way for a reason, to test the rest of us. I do not know. But natural monsters do exist. On that point, nothing you say can shake me. And Steve Leonard is one of them." "But then it isn't his fault," I said, frowning. "If he was born bad, he isn't to blame for growing up evil." "No more than a lion is to blame for being a predator," Mr Crepsley agreed. I thought about that. "If that's the case, we shouldn't hate him — we should pity him." Mr Crepsley shook his head. "No, Darren. You should neither hate nor pity a monster — merely fear it, and do all in your power to make an end of it before it destroys you.

Mister, I understand why you hate Indians and Tories so.” “Well now, you’re a fair-minded duchess. Just been led astray, I reckon.” “But Rising Hawk was only a baby when those terrible things happened. You can’t blame him.” “A Indian’s a Indian, sis. I seen firsthand what they’re capable of. Don’t try and fool yourself. It comes natural to them. That fella’s done plenty of evil.” “No, he hasn’t. He’s probably the kindest human being I’ve ever known, excepting Polly Gunn.” Lawson’s face softened a little at the mention of Polly. Nonetheless, he took her arm in silence and made her walk on. “Please, please let me go. Even if he isn’t bleeding now, he’s sick and weak, and what happens if a bear or a panther finds him there?” “Then that’ll be one less savage to worry about.” “Let me go! You have no rights over me. You’re probably breaking the law. You broke the law shooting Rising Hawk. That was no accident, was it? You shot him on purpose.” She twisted suddenly and bit the filthy hand holding her. She ran and was off the road and deep into a pine grove before he caught up and knocked her to the ground. He had his foot on her back before she knew she was down. “I oughta knock your teeth out for that. I will, if you try that again, you little hellcat. And don’t talk to me about no damn law. I know all about rights. Here’s rights for you. I’m bigger than you, I run faster than you, and I got a gun. Them’s my rights.” Despite her pain and fatigue, Livy struggled furiously to get up. But he held her down until the rage passed out of her and she lay still. Then he let her up and tied her hands again, preaching all the while. “What you do not understand, child, is that a white woman who lives with savages of her own volition is lower than one of them Indian girls. And a white woman who breeds with them is lower than a whore even. You are a nice little girl and too young to know the damage you are doing. I am saving you from yourself.

Ah, guilt. One of the most painful human emotions that one can experience. Even without the burden of an illness, guilt is a part of life. But so many who live with a chronic condition feel intense guilt. When I had first found out that I was pregnant with my son, the very first emotion that kicked in wasn't pure joy or excitement, there were not any happy tears shed from me. My very first thought when I saw the positive pregnancy test was "What kind of mom am I going to be? What if my child grows up to hate me because I can't do everything he'll want to do?" Guilt is such a common emotion that surrounds us. Even those who aren't parents experience it in other ways, guilt over not being able to work anymore, guilt over not getting the chores finished, and the list can go on and on. It can turn into a relentless cycle of self-blame. There is something important to remember here, when guilt decides to sneak up on you. You did not ask for any of this. None of this is in your control, it is not your fault. I do not care if you have to repeat this out loud over and over again to make it stick, but I want you to know that you are still awesome, despite these shitty illnesses.

He stopped, puffing slightly. He studied the shop window for a few seconds, as if he was thinking. Then he faced me. ‘You’re right. Okay? You’re right.’ I stared at him. ‘The Shamrock and Clover. It’s a horrible place. And I know I’ve not been the greatest to work for. But all I can tell you is that, for every miserable directive I give you, my nuts are being squeezed ten times harder by Head Office. My wife hates me because I’m never home. The suppliers hate me because I have to cut their margins every single week because of pressure from shareholders. My regional manager says I’m underperforming on units shifted and if I don’t pull it out of the bag I’m going to get sent to the North Wales Passenger Ferry branch. At which point my wife will actually leave me. And I won’t blame her. ‘I hate managing people. I have the social skills of a lamppost, which is why I can’t hang on to anyone. Vera only stays because she has the skin of a rhino and I suspect she’s secretly after my job. So there – I’m sorry. I’d actually quite like to give you your job back because, whatever I said earlier, you were pretty good. Customers liked you.

It was so bad that Grandpa had whispered to me over dinner one night, sounding bitter as fuck, “You couldn’t have picked a shithead?” I shot him a look that had him rolling his eyes like he blamed me for him not being a total dumbass we could hate on.

The author's thesis is that the right to free speech is being attacked. He goes over several cases in which he feels this is evident: state censorship, freedom of the press, cancel culture, non-hate hate speech regulations, social media companies, "thoughtcrimes," and a lack of trust among the citizenship, to name the major ones. But despite what he claims and how he frames each of these subjects, it's clear that he's either missing the point or, ironically, criticizing the people who have exercised their right to free speech when it wasn't in line with his own personal ideals. [...] In his acknowledgements, Doyle writes: "I am grateful to all those organisations upholding freedom of speech at a time when there are so many who would see our liberties curbed." This is his fear incarnate. Who are these "so many"? By the end of the text, we still have no clear idea. I'd argue that it's a phantasm of the privileged few, one that signals a loss of social power. This text would then be a dirge for changing times ... the author and those of his station mourning the shift, in denial and desperate to pin the blame somewhere, even while time drags them through the stages of grief. I hope that they turn to each other for this emotional labour.

I don’t want to fucking leave. I don’t want to argue. I don’t want to hate myself. I don’t want to blame you. I’m tired of being angry at them, but damn them and…damn you, Cecelia, you were never supposed to know them,

Where did it all go wrong?' Heiner thought vacantly. At first, it was just a feeling of infatuation. All he wanted was to touch her just once. He dared not want her. So, with persistence, he became the marquis' dog. To gain a higher position, to gain more power, to become a "suitable" person. To get a little closer to her. Because there was no way she would pay attention to a soldier who was an orphan and all he knew was to kill people... Heiner looked down at his hand on the window pane. He could still smell the blood that had long since been washed away. He tightened his fists. I know that I am a dirtier and lower human being than you if I am to blame for wrongdoing. I know that I am more of a sinner, having killed countless people and sent my colleagues to their deaths. He didn't want to admit it. He wanted to put all the blame on her. You are so happy being noble while I rolled through the mud to bring you peace. You have no idea whose blood was shed and whose lives were sacrificed. The hardest and saddest thing in your life is not improving your piano skills, that's all. So... I hated you for it. A wave of every dirty, inferior emotion flooded his chest. Heiner's body slowly collapsed. She alone was the reason he struggled so much, but in the end, it turned out like this. Heiner cradled his head in his hands. His breath came in gulps. He eventually couldn't hold it in and let it out. The man crouched in the corner sobbed quietly. From far away, the sound of a piano carried on the wind. He cried for a very long time.

What if he can't handle you on your dark days? 'You haven't seen me at my worst yet... it's not pretty... it's can't-even-do-basic-tasks levels of not pretty, and I rarely know when one of them is coming. Is that something you're ready for?'... 'I-I think so', he says, stumbling over his words. That uncertainty - it will turn into frustration. Anger. Dismissal... 'It's just going to be you and me and my fucking brain conspiring against me.' That troublesome organ I've never been able to fully trust. The thing that distorts reality and cloaks it in the grayest fog. 'I think we should take a few steps back, we'll have clearer heads if we come back to this in a few hours or tomorrow.' He doesn't get it. He can't simply take a few steps back from my mental illness. 'That's what I'm trying to tell you... I may not have a clearer head tomorrow. I can't control it... it doesn't matter how many steps back we take - I'm still going to be this way... and sometimes it manifests in ugly ways. No matter how content I am at any given time, it always comes back. And I've learned to accept that.' 'What? You don't like me like this?' 'That wasn't what I was going to say... i really don't want to say the wrong thing here, ok? I want to tell you we'll get through it together because we care about each other, and because we want to make this work. But I've never done this before either... you're' - he breaks off, trying to hold himself back from saying it, but then goes for it anyway. 'You're not acting like yourself right now. You can't blame me for being a little taken aback.' ...'this is me, Russel. And this is exactly why I don't show that person to anyone.' 'That wasn't what I meant,' he says, and there it is - a thread of irritation in his voice. There's a limit to how far I can push him, because there always is. I'm already spiraling, my mind taking me down a familiar path. He can't handle me. 'I don't think i can do this.' The words claw up my throat, but it has to be done... i hate that I say it. Worse, I hate the way I believe it.

You don’t like me because of Bay, right?” “I don’t dislike you,” Clove argued. “I just … Bay doesn’t trust you.” “Do you agree with her?” “I don’t know,” Clove said. “I … you seem nice to me. Thistle and Bay see it another way.” “Bay is convinced I’m up to something nefarious, and Thistle likes to hate everyone,” I supplied. “I get it.” “Thistle doesn’t hate everyone,” Clove argued. “Other than Marcus and the other members of your family, who does she like?” “She’s fond of the UPS delivery guy,” Clove said. “He always hits on her and thinks she’s bohemian and chic. She likes him.” “Well, that’s something,” I said, tamping down my irritation. In truth, I couldn’t blame Bay for being suspicious. I lied and infiltrated her place of business, and then followed her around town trying to get proof regarding my

Despite the risk, I don’t think it would be wise to cancel the festival,” he said, and would have left it at that had I not pursued a justification. “The Hytanicans are on edge, but there are still several days until the event. Word of the compensation we provided will spread, tempers will cool and excitement over the festival will set in. If we shut down the celebration, the people will feel twice wronged, and I’ll again be the most hated individual in the province. I’m the one they will blame.” Narian was accustomed--as accustomed as one could be--to being disliked, but he didn’t want to lose the small bit of progress we had made toward redeeming his character. I wondered if this was in part because our marriage hung in the balance.

Free,' Wing protested, shaking himself as if to throw off his own shock in order to protect Darsey. She sensed his anger at any blame being attached to her and it made her cringe with guilt. She had done this to him and she deserved to be blamed. Horror rose in her, pushing its way past shock and carrying her voice with it. 'I crippled you. I stole your frond,' she choked, still struggling to absorb what had happened. 'I'm so sorry. It's all my fault-' Her mind was almost screaming, much louder than her words, but she didn't understand why Free staggered back and Wing's remaining frond furled tight, to tuck hard against his throat. It was only when he hurled the row of seats between them and gripped her by the arms that she became aware of his distress 'Darse, calm,' he ordered, releasing her, but mentally underlining his demand until the thoughts roaring through all their minds grew quieter. However, despite being muted, they were still there, running frantically fast from Darsey's head to her frond. 'Calm,' Wing instructed more soothingly and then frowned at the words he could still sense. 'None such,' he denied vehemently. 'I don't hate you. Not ever and you're not the...the alien in some monster movie. And you don't eat your mates.' He paused and raised an eyebrow at her. 'Do you?

Why is this so important to you, Deep? Why do you hate me so much that you can’t stand even the thought of being tied to me?” “I don’t hate you.” His deep voice was suddenly hoarse. “If I hated you, or cared for you even a little less, I wouldn’t hesitate to complete our bond, little Kat.” “You told me you felt nothing,” she said, her voice trembling despite herself. “I lied,” he whispered. “Deep doesn’t hate you, my lady,” Lock said, sounding bitter. “He hates himself. And we all must pay for his self loathing.” “I’m sorry,” Deep said in a soft, agonized voice. “Lock is right—forgive me for all I have put you through. But please don’t think any of it is because of you, my Kat. I bear this blame alone.” For

If you’ll give me a chance, I’d just like a chance to show you that I—I’m sorry, Brie. Can’t we—? Can’t we try again? See each other? See if we can rekindle some of what we had? I know it’ll take time…. If we can’t, I have no one to blame but myself, but can we just—” She gave a huff of laughter. “Poor Brad,” she said. “You went from two women who couldn’t get enough of you to no one. You’re not getting laid, are you? You’re pathetic!” “I know you’re angry—you should be. I’ll make it up to you somehow. Just give me time, give us time—” “No!” she yelled at him. “No!” And then she started to laugh again. “God, you don’t know how long I waited to hear you say that! Even while I was hating you, I might have taken you back!” She shook her head in disbelief. “Jesus! Thank God you didn’t pull this sooner.” “Brie—” “For God’s sake, do I want anything to do with a man who can cheat on his wife because there’s some kind of physical thing? Something you can’t even explain? Forgive me, but I thought we had something physical!” “We did. We will again.” “No. No. Go. Get out of here. You left me for my best friend and now you’d like to see if we can rekindle something? Oh, you are such a fool. What did I ever see in you? Why didn’t I know this about you? Go!” “No, Brie, there’s more.” “I can’t take any more,” she said. “They found him.” She was stunned for a second. She couldn’t breathe. “What?” she asked. “What did you say?” He took a deep breath. “They found him—Jerome Powell. He’s in Florida. They have him in custody there. They’re working on the extradition. I think you’ll get a call tomorrow from the D.A. I heard it at work.” She took a step toward him. “Why didn’t you tell me this first?” she asked in a furious whisper. “Because I wanted you to know that I love you. I’d like to be with you through this. With you when they bring him back. I want to take care of you.” “Oh, my God,” she said in a breath. “You thought I’d take you back out of fear? Helplessness? You’re an idiot, that’s what you are! A big, stupid, goddamn idiot!” He hung his head. “Don’t you think I feel pretty terrible about what happened? Haven’t I been around since it happened? Don’t you think it’s killing me? Hell, Brie—that’s probably what broke me and Christine apart.” She started to laugh again, but tears smarted in her eyes at the same time. “It’s all about you, isn’t it, Brad?” There was a sweet voice in her head. There will be no taking, mija. Only giving. “I want a chance to try to make it right,” he said. “Well, you can’t. No one can make it right, especially you. You made your choice, Brad. You’re stuck with it.

March 14 Obedience His servants ye are to whom ye obey. Romans 6:16 The first thing to do in examining the power that dominates me is to take hold of the unwelcome fact that I am responsible for being thus dominated because I have yielded. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame for it because at a point away back I yielded myself to myself. Likewise, if I obey God I do so because I have yielded myself to Him. Yield in childhood to selfishness, and you will find it the most enchaining tyranny on earth. There is no power in the human soul of itself to break the bondage of a disposition formed by yielding. Yield for one second to anything in the nature of lust (remember what lust is: “I must have it at once,” whether it be the lust of the flesh or the lust of the mind, once yield and though you may hate yourself for having yielded, you are a bond-slave to that thing. There is no release in human power at all, but only in the Redemption. You must yield yourself in utter humiliation to the only One Who can break the dominating power, viz., the Lord Jesus Christ. “He hath anointed Me . . . to preach deliverance to the captives.” We find this out in the most ridiculously small ways—“Oh, I can give that habit up when I like.” You cannot, you will find that the habit absolutely dominates you because you yielded to it willingly. It is easy to sing—“He will break every fetter,” and at the same time be living a life of obvious slavery to yourself. Yielding to Jesus will break every form of slavery in any human life.

as alexander hamilton who shared my name with one phillp skylar my mother, and my father eliza who i told to steal my identy in the war, iam nothign more then proud of the work on my deathbed writing again. i always surive true imoratlity and amenia disorder wtih life like reborn disorders cant be cured. but as alexian smith the former princess diana and smauel sabery you just seem unread. unscripted. and missed the point of the burnings of heart and bon fires in reetribution to racism in state and notion. You miss the point of what occured or whatever relaxed to it. I dont hate having multiple personaltiis. or living forever in stupid wayward ideas. that donald bloke has a diosrder called idiocy where hes accidently racist and you liked him for that. no i still dont hate you as avery pines. and no matter what occured when i was tortured in stupid situations, worst then a single one and counting somehow creepily for all of them, because my dad was and i was not. you must understand the history of why it was a town you now never knew of the name of. and why it was occurance and why it was the stories of it. And why nobody knew the musical hamilton was about my father alexander of americas presdient and me the secretary of state. my real name is adam snowflake. and if you loved a dam thing i ever wrteo from death note to creepy stalkings or the kingdom diaries or lspds, and what i built at disney naimating snow white and aruara and filming hawkuseris abotu my lack of faith as scince lik ebuilding jeeus you would know i never often resented it after highschool. and its better to remember a dead name as dead. i am not the evil events that defined me. but i am all the pain of them. and that is my wolrd. And you are ar acit for demanding i be things liek civil war or holocuast. and you are a racist slutty loser like i and bad king actors were steryped to be. and no matter what ever occured or how casuality is evil when in office. i want you to know no matter what i study or why i dress. its th history of me being an emo teenage fagot, and my mother was abusive as reya. and just interputed me to scream her ass off as reya fine an adbucter when orphaned. its easy to blame a color when the person is faceless. did you know im half that story. and did you know in the way i looked like the one you liked? When you have a boogie man, its so easy to hate the things you try to stop. Fuck you ukraine im jewish. and i know what you took. and while i didnt go. Oh god can i never go by frank again as someone in a clsoet room who surived that. and i want you to know as adam i will never be what you did to me. but oh god did you amke it look liket he people from russia fuck you royal.

After a couple of hours she breathlessly put aside her palette knife and asked, ‘Did you ever experiment with your handwriting?’ I thought about this as Jacinta poured herself a glass of milk from a carton. ‘I suppose so. Once I wasn’t being forced to use joined up writing with a fountain pen any more. Why?’ ‘You sent me a few of my old exercise books from school after you cleared out Mum’s place a few years ago. Do you remember?’ I told her I didn’t. Maybe David had posted them to her. ‘When I was at primary school I wrote using the whole wide line. The capitals touched the top and everything was balloony, you know, round and chipper. But my handwriting in the later exercise books, I think I must have been fourteen or so, was completely truncated like inky footprints made by ants. I could hardly make out what I’d written. I don’t know how the teachers deciphered it. I still don’t quite know what comes naturally when I write. I don’t have a style. It changes. Sometimes it’s all swallowed up and at other times I write using tall, spindly letters. Maybe it’s the pen and paper I’m using. That makes a difference.’ ‘Yeah, it does,’ I agreed. ‘I hate thin-ruled paper.’ She took a gulp from her milk. The light was behind her. I couldn’t see her features. Her hair was pulled back into a low ponytail like the one she wore to school for years. I hated Mum. I hated Pete. I hated Gavin. I hated myself. Jacinta said, ‘When I paint I have a signature. It’s my own and I don’t have to be afraid.’ ‘I’m sorry, Jacinta. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what to do.’ ‘I don’t blame you. But I thought you’d forgotten. Or forgiven. Or a bit of both.’ ‘A bit of both,’ I admitted. She was quiet, began to clean up. I didn’t help. I just watched. And eventually she turned back to me and said, ‘How’s Zoey?

School, and it's shite attitudes towards whatever or whoever I was, was the source of my frustration. They shunted my classes a little as I found myself falling headfirst into the comprehensive school abyss, Joining the educational subnormal in staring at walls for hours on end whilst being babysat whatever lesson I had been removed from. Black and Asian capitalise that undo that people went from being my neighbours and classmates to parasitical leeches I could barely bring myself to acknowledge joining the educational subnormal in staring at walls for hours on end whilst being babysat through whatever lesson I had been removed from. Black and Asian people went from being my neighbours and classmates to parasitical leeches I could barely bring myself to acknowledge. they were not worth my time. I was beginning to understand what the stickers and I newspapers had meant. I was beginning to understand that deep sense of frustration that these people were sealing my history and by birthright. Why couldn't they just fuck off where they truly belong? And their 'protectors', the teachers and civil servants with their bleeding Hearts and cheap, shit, French cars were little more than university-educated scum from the middle classes sent to suppress my freedom.

I counseled myself to patient, repeated attempts despite Sean’s pissy attitude. I had the advantage of being druid-trained; still, it took me years to figure out that the earth is the seat of my power, and how to nuance and finesse it. Sean’s lost in an inner darkness of his own creation and can see nothing—wants to see nothing—beyond it. He believes on some level he deserves to be lost in despair. I was in that desperate, bleak hell for a long time, too. I hated everyone and everything, blamed everyone and everything. And as long as I felt that way, I made no progress. We’re fools to think injury or bad luck occurs from a single happenstance, or can ever truly be blamed on anyone or thing. We own our fates, we choose to get up in the morning, we choose to go out into the world and live, so we’re always at least one part complicit. That doesn’t mean we’re at fault for what befalls us, merely that we must own what’s befallen us, in order to continue forward in a meaningful way. Regardless of what hand life deals us, we are what we are, and railing against it makes not one bloody iota of difference and only keeps us trapped where we don’t want to be and, honestly, don’t belong. You must be meticulous about the thoughts you send out into the universe. It’s listening. Argue for your limits and, sure enough, they’re yours. You have to argue for your dreams.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand—glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. • • • The author of the monograph, a native of Schenectady, New York, was said by some to have had the highest I.Q. of all the war criminals who were made to face a death by hanging. So it goes. Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Once this is understood, the disagreeable behavior of American enlisted men in German prisons ceases to be a mystery. • • • Howard W. Campbell, Jr., now discussed the uniform of the American enlisted in World War Two: Every other army in history, prosperous or not, has attempted to clothe even its lowliest soldiers so as to make them impressive to themselves and others as stylish experts in drinking and copulation and looting and sudden death. The American Army, however, sends its enlisted men out to fight and die in a modified business suit quite evidently made for another man, a sterilized but unpressed gift from a nose-holding charity which passes out clothing to drunks in the slums. When a dashingly-clad officer addresses such a frumpishly dressed bum, he scolds him, as an officer in any army must. But the officer’s contempt is not, as in other armies, avuncular theatricality. It is a genuine expression of hatred for the poor, who have no one to blame for their misery but themselves. A prison administrator dealing with captured American enlisted men for the first time should be warned: Expect no brotherly love, even

other races is dictated by our system, and not our hearts. Who we see as successful, who has access to that success, who we see as scary, what traits we value in society, who we see as “smart” and “beautiful”—these perceptions are determined by our proximity to the cultural values of the majority in power, the economic system of those in power, the education system of those in power, the media outlets of those in power—I could go on, but at no point will you find me laying blame at the feet of one misguided or even hateful white person, saying, “and this is Steve’s fault—core beliefs about black people are all determined by Steve over there who just decided he hates black people all on his own.” Steve is interacting with the system in the way in which it’s designed, and the end result is racial bigotry that supports the continued oppression of people of color. Systemic racism is a machine that runs whether we pull the levers or not, and by just letting it be, we are responsible for what it produces. We have to actually dismantle the machine if we want to make change.

Against you, Doctor! How could I have it in for you when you’re so nice to me? Against poor Leonard, who does everything he can so that I don’t get worked up, so that I get along here as well as possible? Against anyone else? Well, that’s another story! I have to say that I can’t stand that quack Bid’homme. Of course, I feel sorry for him—as he deserves—but I am tired of seeing this ridiculous fool, who should be put in a straightjacket, intimidate, act like a tyrant, rant and rave, yell and insult everyone. He should be washed with Niagara jets until he bursts, which would not be a great loss to humanity! That Bid’homme! Argh! Him, yes, I hate! He’s a constant danger to the patients, whom he knows nothing about, and whom he might kill with his stupid brutality! Why don’t you lock up this dangerous lunatic, Doctor—or, at least, send him back to Franche-Comté, to his family, if they agree to be responsible for such an evil creature and keep him tied up 24 hours a day?” What was I saying? Doctor Froin looked different; he shrugged his shoulders sadly. I saw him—his mind was made up now: I was a monomaniacal madman with delusions of persecution. All my ideas, all my preoccupations and all my anger, was focused on Bid’homme. I was acting exactly like someone who was crazy. I would keep saying that he hounded his patients and hated them all—me, first and foremost! His doubts about his assistant might even have been erased by my angry outburst. He could blame it all on my madness. I tried desperately to redeem myself, to save myself. What should I do? What should I say? Wouldn’t I be cleverer to tell him everything I was thinking—however uncomfortable it might be? I cried out—as unloudly as possible: “Doctor! No! Don’t write me off like that with a flick of your hand. I know what you’re thinking; you think I’m obsessed! Don’t deny it: I’m sure of it! But it’s nothing like that! To show you I’m not the least bit deranged, let me say that I was a little hard just now—even though I hate your colleague Bid’homme, and think he’s dangerous and harmful to your patients, I have absolutely no problem thinking about other things. Why, today, I thought about a thousand things that had nothing to do with him. Do you want me to tell you about waking up this morning in this room? About what went on inside my head—pointing out the difference between the sane ideas and those that are still a little…off? Do you want to be sure that I am not sneaky or vindictive, like most of the mental patients? Well! You just told me that my relatives are coming on Monday, but you didn’t say whom, probably because you were concerned about making me angry. I’m going to tell you: it’s Roffieux—the one who brought me here. I swear to you that I have no hard feelings against him. I can honestly say that he is close to my heart, but if I leave Vassetot, no harm will come to him from me, I guarantee it. I will do what any good man would do in the same situation: I will go as far away as possible. True enough, he disgusts me and I don’t want him to have any more control over me, but it would never enter my mind to play a dirty trick on him!

Can it be true?'--she cried--'shall I be fain To follow one, that strives to hide and fly? Esteem a man that has me in disdain? Pray him that never hears my supplant cry? Suffer who hates me o'er my heart to reign? One that his lofty virtues holds so high, T'were need some heaven-born goddess should descend From realms above, his stubborn heart to bend? ... Yea: rather of myself I should complain, Than the desire, to which I bared my breast Whereby was Reason hunted from her reign, And all my powers by stronger force opprest. Thus borne from bad to worse, without a rein I cannot the unbridled beast arrest; Who makes me see I to destruction haste, That I bitterness in death may taste. Yet, ah! why blame myself? Wherein have I Ever offended, save in loving thee? What wonder was it then that suddenly A woman's feeble sense opprest should be? Why fence and guard myself, lest bearing high Wise words, and beauty rare should pleasure me? Most wretched is the mortal that would shun To look upon the visage of the sun

We are good. We are good enough. We are appropriate to life. Much of our anxiety and fearfulness stems, I believe, from constantly telling ourselves that we’re just not up to facing the world and all its situations. Nathaniel Branden calls this “a nameless sense of being unfit for reality.”6 I’m here to say we are fit for reality. Relax. Wherever we need to go and whatever we need to do, we are appropriate for that situation. We will do fine. Relax. It’s okay to be who we are. Who or what else can we be? Just do our best at whatever we are called upon to do. What more can we do? Sometimes, we can’t even do our best; that’s okay, too. We may have feelings, thoughts, fears, and vulnerabilities as we go through life, but we all do. We need to stop telling ourselves we’re different for doing and feeling what everyone else does. We need to be good to ourselves. We need to be compassionate and kind to ourselves. How can we expect to take care of ourselves appropriately if we hate or dislike ourselves? We need to refuse to enter into an antagonistic relationship with ourselves. Quit blaming ourselves and being victimized, and take responsible steps to remove the victim. Put the screws to guilt. Shame and guilt serve no long-term purpose.

Hawke shook his head, but when I tugged on the hand he held, he bent over me. My grip on his shirt tightened when he stopped with his mouth mere inches from mine. “In a few minutes, when this storm passes, you’ll return to loathing my very existence, and for good reason. You’re going to hate that you begged me to kiss you, to do more. But even without my blood in you, I know you’ve never stopped wanting me. But when I’m deep inside you again, and I will be, you won’t be able to blame the influence of blood or anything else.

Utter fucking disaster. “I don’t want to fucking leave. I don’t want to argue. I don’t want to hate myself. I don’t want to blame you. I’m tired of being angry at them, but damn them and…damn you, Cecelia, you were never supposed to know them, you were never,” his face twists with fury as my heart seizes, “you were…” He jerks me to stand, pulling me against him, anger rolling off his frame, anguish in his eyes. “Yours. I was always supposed to be yours,” I say as he nods and crushes me with his kiss.

Dear Sara, First I want to apologize for everything that I have done. I am so sorry for hurting you. I was just so angry with Tom; I had no right to take it out on you. I thought it would be best if I moved out of the house for a while. I started attending AA meetings on Monday nights. I have also been talking to a counselor. He has helped me to face a lot of the problems that I couldn’t deal with on my own. A lot of the drinking and the violence was from the fact that I miss my mother. I never got a chance to see her or even get to hear her voice. My dad hated me for all these years because he blamed me for her death. Sara, I had no one. No one to talk to. No one to hug me. No one to tuck me in at night. I never had a father/son talk. I envied you. You grew up on a farm with people that loved you. I think a part of me was jealous. For once in my life, I have someone to love and I don’t know how to handle it. The problem is not you, Sara. It never was. The problem is me. I need to learn how to love, so that I can be a husband for you and a father for my children. I don’t know how long it’s gonna take and if you want to divorce me, then I’ll understand. The court hearing is in two weeks. I know that you have to testify. When I turned myself in, I told the police that I hit you and you fell on the floor, causing your cuts and bruises. I know that I lied to them, but I really need some help, Sara. If I’m locked up in prison, I can’t get the help that I need. The prison system doesn’t help those guys. They come out of prison doing the same things that they got locked up for. I want to change and be a better man. The only way I can do that is if you testify that I only hit you once since we’ve been married. I hate to put you in this position, and if you want to tell the truth, then I understand. You do what you feel that you have to do. I just feel positive about our future. With the counselor and the AA meetings, I know that we can finally be that perfect couple that you always wanted us to be. I love you and our beautiful children. Give them a big kiss for me, baby. I want to hold you in my arms so bad, but I know I can’t, not until I get the help I need. Love, Mike

I see slime as our world's most triumphant substance; slowly slime is covering the earth, more of it made every day—more whiny people, more filthy thoughts, crummy plans, cruddy things, contemptible actions—multiplying like evil spores (we were told to be fruitful, not to trash the place); so that now there are more artifacts and less art, more that is tame, little that is wild, more people, fewer species, more things, less world, more of the disappointment we all know so well, the defeats which devour us, the hours we spend with our heads buried in our books, blinding our eyes with used up words, while the misspending of our loins leads to more lives and less life—just thing (we members of the better species) what divine sparks we might have played at being, and come and gone with spirit; instead, around us, as before, nobodies are killing nobodies for nothing—oh yes, we know it, what failures we all are; but don't blame me for it, don't take your anger and resentment out on me only because I took the villain's part for once and tried to understand him; have you ever thought what the theater of life would be like if there were no villains, or, if villains are so villainous—so hateful, so reprehensible, to be avoided at all cost—why there are so many of them prospering among us; oh, sure, we love to thing victim, weep victim, mourn the murdered, pity the robbed, comfort the bereft, while villains get our sympathy only if their villainy demonstrates how they, poor things, have been victimized; and how we adore the bruises of the beaten, with whom, of course, we identify; but what of the beater's calluses, the beater's weary arms? since he, you see, for one brief moment, perhaps, is getting his own back, turning the tables, making a statement, and it says, that statement, it says: now I can produce pain, not merely receive it; no I can say I hate you in your helpless ear; now I can feel in my fingers the only justice I shall ever know, the vibration of my blows.

Iwalked home from the office and found Meg sitting on the stairs. She was sobbing. Uncontrollably. My love, what’s happened? I thought for sure we’d lost the baby. I went to her on my knees. She choked out that she didn’t want to do this anymore. Do what? Live. I didn’t catch her meaning at first. I didn’t understand, maybe didn’t want to understand. My mind just didn’t want to process the words. It’s all so painful, she was saying. What is? To be hated like this—for what? What had she done? she asked. She really wanted to know. What sin had she committed to deserve this kind of treatment? She just wanted to make the pain stop, she said. Not only for her, for everyone. For me, for her mother. But she couldn’t make it stop, so she’d decided to disappear. Disappear? Without her, she said, all the press would go away, and then I wouldn’t have to live like this. Our unborn child would never have to live like this. It’s so clear, she kept saying, it’s so clear. Just stop breathing. Stop being. This exists because I exist. I begged her not to talk like that. I promised her we’d get through it, we’d find a way. In the meantime, we’d find her the help she needed. I asked her to be strong, hang on. Incredibly, while reassuring her, and hugging her, I couldn’t entirely stop thinking like a fucking royal. We had a Sentebale engagement that night, at the Royal Albert Hall, and I kept telling myself: We can’t be late. We cannot be late. They’ll skin us alive! And they’ll blame her. Slowly—too slowly—I realized that tardiness was the least of our problems. I said she should skip the engagement, of course. I needed to go, make a quick appearance, but I’d be home fast. No, she insisted, she didn’t trust herself to be at home alone for even an hour with such dark feelings. So we put on our best kit, and she applied dark, dark lipstick to draw attention away from her bloodshot eyes, and out of the door we went. The car pulled up outside the Royal Albert Hall, and as we stepped into the blue flashing lights of the police escort and the whiteout lights of the press’s flashbulbs, Meg reached for my hand. She gripped it tightly. As we went inside, she gripped it even tighter. I was buoyed by the tightness of that grip. She’s hanging on, I thought. Better than letting go. But when we settled into the royal box, and the lights dimmed, she let go of her emotions. She couldn’t hold back the tears. She wept silently. The music struck up, we turned and faced the front. We spent the entire length of the performance (Cirque du Soleil) squeezing each other’s hands, me promising her in a whisper: Trust me. I’ll keep you safe.

It shouldn't even be up for discussion, in a perfect world. The rights of women should be sacrosanct. If men bore children, there would be no need for law; the right would simply exist. As a woman, I take great exception to my rights being used as a political platform by greedy and dishonest politicians to gather voters to their side. It reinforces the fact that women--in general--are viewed as lesser beings in our society. That being said, I appreciate your thoughts on this subject, Tom. As men go, you're exceptional. I hate what most people view as feminism these days. It's become ugly and combative, and the movement has lost its focus. It's become a man vs. woman "blame game", and it has to stop before we can evolve further. To me, feminism is simply equal rights--HUMAN rights. I will always thank a guy for those lovely gestures like holding my door and helping me with my coat. I'm old-fashioned that way. However, I realize that if I want to be respected, I have to give a man something to respect. I treat him and his feelings with equal care. A lot of my "new feminist" friends hate me because I actually THINK that it's okay to be pretty, to shave my legs and under my arms, to have long hair and to smile...and I choose to keep my bra, not burn it. Like Bukowski said, "I have little time for things for things that have no soul." That sums up our government, our politicians and their shameless manipulation of my rights as a woman. I saw my Grandmother and my Mom destroyed by the way that it was back in the good old days. I'll always be grateful for the strong and quiet femininity that they've passed on to me, and for the passionate blood in my veins manifested as a child born in the era of revolution.

But as much as they may try to blame me, I am confident I have asked myself the same and much tougher questions with the hollow realization I had no good answers. I can’t change any of that. But as imperfect a messenger as I may be, what my tribe has encouraged, blessed, and promoted should not be forgotten or forgiven. Even if Donald Trump loses in 2020, the Republican Party has legitimized bigotry and hate as an organizing principle for a major political party in a country with a unique role in the world.

EBB: As I recall, “Cell Block Tango” was a very difficult number to write. It’s not so much a song as a musical scene for six women, and each has to tell her personal story in the course of a musical refrain that keeps repeating. It was difficult because each of the stories had to be entertaining and also meaningful. Each one had to be of a length that didn’t go on too long and run the risk of being boring. We kept rewriting and rewriting those stories that the women told to go with the refrain— He had it coming He had it coming He only had himself to blame. If you’d have been there If you’d have seen it I betcha would have done the same! KANDER: When Gwen was sick during Chicago, Liza took over for eight weeks and she came close to making the show a hit. EBB: She did all of Gwen’s blocking. KANDER: She learned that show in a week. EBB: I guess I should confess this. I had been with Liza in California, and when we were on our way back to New York on the plane, when I knew Liza was going to do Chicago, I was egging her on to get little things back into the show that I lost during my collaboration with Fosse. I desperately wanted “My Own Best Friend” to be a song just for Roxie. That was the way it was originally supposed to be done. But Bobby took that song and added Chita as Velma. He had them at the edge of the stage, obviously mocking the high-end cabaret singers with their phony Oh-look-at-me attitude. He hated songs like— KANDER: “I Did It My Way.” EBB: And “I Gotta Be Me.” He hated them.

... we he talks to you, he makes it seem like you're the only person in the world even when it's only polite chitchat. And I can't even blame him, because it's not pretense; it's just being a nice guy.

The Author of Her Misfortune" I’m not the man she claims. But this much is true: the past is distant, a receding coastline, and we’re all in the same boat, a scrim of rain over the sea-lanes. Still, I wish she wouldn’t keep on saying those things about me! Over the long course everything but hope lets you go, then even that loosens its grip. There isn’t enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance, prevails. It’s true I’m happy now. And it’d be nice if she could hold her tongue. Stop hating me for being happy. Blaming me for her life. I’m afraid I’m mixed up in her mind with someone else. A young man of no character, living on dreams, who swore he’d love her forever. One who gave her a ring, and a bracelet. Who said, Come with me. You can trust me. Things to that effect. I’m not that man. She has me confused, as I said, with someone else.

I didn’t expect you to call me,” Ashton said softly while studying the plate of biscuits in her hands. I’d had a moment of intense weakness when I’d woken up form an incredibly good dream she had starred in. All I could think about was being near her again. “I hated the way we left things last night.” She blushed and glanced up at me. “I’m really sorry about how I acted.” Damn, damn, damn, I wasn’t going to be able to resist her. Pushing Sawyer to the deep, dark forgotten part of my mind, I walked over to her, took the plate of biscuits, and put them down on the counter. “I told you last night: I started it. I should be the one apologizing.” She let out a small laugh and stared down at her feet. “No, I distinctly remember it being my leg that was hiked up in your lap and my hand that was up your shirt. You had completely stopped touching me. Thanks for trying to take the blame off me, but I was there, Beau.” I slipped my arms around her waist and pulled her to me. Right now I didn’t care who she belonged to. I wanted her and I couldn’t see past my need. “Look at me,” I whispered, slipping my finger under her chin and tilting her face up so I could see her eyes. “The only reason I didn’t grab you and haul you onto my lap last night was because for the first time in my life, I want something that belongs to the only person I love. I started touching you last night because I couldn’t keep my hands off you. I thought if I could touch you just a little bit, I’d be able to handle it. But then you didn’t react the way I expected.” I stopped and closed my eyes. Staring down at her while I talked about her reaction to my touch was difficult. Those big, innocent green eyes soaked in every word out of my mouth. God, she was perfect. “And my good intentions were fading fast. If you’d kept touching me for just a few more seconds, I’d have lost it. I was hanging on by a thread. A very thin thread.” She stepped back out of my embrace and gave me a little grin. “Okay. Thank you for saying that.” She turned and walked over to the counter then began taking the plastic wrap off the biscuits. “We both love him. Neither of us wants to hurt him. But…we’re drawn to each other. We have history. The three of us. For the past few years, it’s been just me and Sawyer. I didn’t want it to be that way; it just happened. I think we can all be friends again. I want us to be. So while he’s gone, let’s just enjoy being friends. I promise to keep my hands to myself if you promise the same.” She peered at me over her shoulder as she moved to set the biscuits on plates she’d found in the dish rack. Telling her how I’d do anything she asked wasn’t exactly the best move. I nodded and went to get glasses and orange juice so we could eat breakfast together. Just like we use to.

she says something nasty.’ ‘Well, not nasty, exactly,’ Gertie said. ‘More sly, isn’t it?’ Celeste nodded. ‘Like the time she said that you were looking well.’ Evie gave a mad sort of laugh. ‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘She said I suited the extra weight I’d put on.’ ‘And the time she admired my dress,’ Gertie said, ‘and then went on to say that she wished they’d come in petite so that she could have one too.’ Celeste gave a knowing smile. ‘I don’t think it’s natural to be as skinny as Simone,’ she said. ‘No,’ Evie said. ‘Didn’t she once say that she hated chocolate? How can you trust anyone who doesn’t like chocolate? It’s not natural, is it?’ ‘It certainly isn’t,’ Celeste said, enjoying the jovial mood between them and wishing it could be like this more often. ‘And if she says my fingernails look like a man’s one more time, I swear I’m going to scream,’ Gertie said. The sisters laughed together before getting out of the car. Oak House was on the edge of a pretty village in what was known as ‘High Suffolk’ – the area to the north-west of the county famous for its rolling countryside. The house itself wasn’t attractive. Or at least it wasn’t attractive to Celeste, who was suspicious of any architecture that came after the Arts and Crafts movement – which this one certainly had. She still found it hard to understand how her father could have bought a mock-Tudor house when he had lived in a bona fide medieval home for so many years. She looked up at its black and white gable and couldn’t help wincing at such modernity. It was the same inside, too, with neatly plastered walls and floors that neither sloped nor squeaked. But, then again, Oak House had never known damp or deathwatch beetle and there was never the slightest chance of being cold in the fully insulated rooms with their central heating. ‘God, I’d rather spend an afternoon with Esther Martin,’ Gertie said as they approached the front door, which sheltered in a neat little porch where Simone had placed a pot of begonias. Celeste didn’t like begonias. Mainly because they weren’t roses. ‘I popped my head in to see if Esther was all right this morning and she nearly bit it off,’ Celeste said. ‘I’ve given up on her,’ Gertie said. ‘I’ve tried – I’ve really tried to be nice, but she is the rudest person I’ve ever met.’ Evie sighed. ‘You can’t blame her

It’s always the people who most hate the idea of turning into their parents who end up doing so. The millennials blame the boomers for wrecking the country, yet rather than break free from their influence, we continue seeing the world in their terms. Our social justice activities devote their lives to the same causes, with only the most minute updates in terminology but an agenda otherwise unchanged. Our rebels wear the same Che Guevara T-shirts, do the same drugs, obsess over the same music. I remember being surprised back in high school that the stoners cutting class behind the gym all had Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd patches on their jackets, and not anything more contemporary.

I am a Carpathian male. I have the blood of the earth flowing in my veins. I have waited centuries for my lifemate. Carpathian men do not like other men near their women. I am struggling with unfamiliar emotions, Raven. They are not easy to control. You do not behave as a Carpathian woman would.” A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Mikhail leaned lazily against the wall. “I did not expect to come home to find you gone. You put yourself in danger, Raven, something the males of our race cannot allow. And then I find you with a human. A male.” “He was in pain,” she said quietly. Mikhail made a sound of annoyance. “He wanted you.” Her eyelashes fluttered, blue eyes meeting his, startled and unsure. “But…no, Mikhail, you’re mistaken, you must be. I was only trying to comfort him. He lost both of his parents.” She looked close to tears. He held up his hand to silence her. “And you wanted to be in his company. Not sexually, but still, his human company, do not deny it. I could feel the need in you.” Her tongue touched her lips nervously. She couldn’t deny it. It had been entirely subconscious on her part, but now that he had spoken the words aloud, she knew it was true. She had felt the need for human companionship. Mikhail was so intense, everything in his world so unfamiliar. Raven hated that she’d hurt him, hated that she had been the one to push him to the edge of his control. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to do anything but go for a short walk. When I heard him, I felt the need to make certain he was all right. I didn’t know, Mikhail, that I was seeking human company.” “I do not blame you, little one, never that.” His voice was so gentle, it turned her heart over. “I can easily read your memories. I know of your intent. And I would never blame you for your compassionate nature.

Start accepting yourself with the following tips: Above all, accept yourself without hatred. Use non-blaming and simple phrases. In your case, say “I am an unreflective thinker”. Assess yourself without blaming and self-hate. Blaming only leads to being defensive, which will bring out your ego and pride.