Because November 25th is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

“Rape’s not something where you just go, “Well, get over it” or “Believe in love and peace, my child, and it’ll all be over.” Well, fuck you, that isn’t the answer. It’s a great thought, OK, but you can go and stick crystals up your butt and get on with it. I’m all for love and peace, but that’s not the side I work on. If somebody would talk about it, or worse, joke about it, I would be ready to kill. That’s not healing. It was a very long time after that before I was able to be with anyone again. And it has never been the same as it was before” 

“Something comes up like bubbles to the surface, bringing up another part of ourselves that has been silent; that we were in the dark about. Lurking. Nightmares aren’t my favorite thing. I want to feel safe, period. My soul wants to feel safe not terrorized.”

“For many years, I shut down that place inside myself that needed to rage, cry, ask questions and basically just express herself. I made a conscious choice when I put ‘Me and a Gun’ on the record not to stay a victim anymore.”

“The last thing I want to be known as is ‘The Girl Who Got Raped’. The big turn around you make in your head is from victim to survivor.”

“You can’t change what happened. And nobody’s asking you to forgive. But you can’t associate all men with violence.”

“It’s about realizing, painfully, you’ve kept that voice inside yourself, locked away from even yourself. And you step back and see that your jailer has changed faces. You realize you’ve become your own jailer.”

“A lot of times you shut off your whole heart off from your experience — you close the door, and you wither and die. My hope is that the RAINN hotline can be a bridge to the next step.” 

“I’m doing this so that people who feel at 21 their lives are over, or they don’t know how to have an intimate relationship, that they can be beautiful again.”

“The idea is to rescue myself from the role of a victim. That I have a choice left. Though I can’t change what has happened, I can choose how to react. And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being bitter and locked up.”

“People out there must be told about the self-loathing that follows rape and how it’s the greatest breakage in divine law to mutilate themselves, as I have done."

“You decide whether you look at your reality or live pretending these feelings don’t exist.”

“You have to crawl into the wounds to discover what your fears are. Once the bleeding starts, the cleansing can begin.”

“I started to accept the mess I’m in. I know that mess spelled backwards is ssem and I felt much better armed with that information.”

“I think you have to know who you are, get to know the monster that lives in your soul, dive deep into your soul and explore it.”

“I see the dream and I see the nightmare, and I believe you can’t have the dream without the nightmare.” 

“I think that the nightmares are telling me things about myself that I need to know. And I try to understand what they mean, so I can get to know something more about my soul.”

“Anger is healthy, but out of balance if it doesn’t have compassion.”

“I am finding that vulnerability gives me great strength, because you’re not hiding anymore.”