33 Quotes by Olga Trujillo

I felt a catch in my chest and a pulsing in my ears and then I felt calm and numb, with a fuzziness that I couldn't think through, much thicker than before.

I heard this as if the doctor were at other end of a long tunnel. I had trouble connecting his words into sentences with meaning.

Sometimes I look older than I feel. Sometimes my hands seem bigger than they should be or I feel taller than I think I should be.

I understood these things intellectually, the way I understand that the world is round or that gravity is a universal force. But it took me a long time to truly grasp what Dr. Summer had told me many times before: "To survive a violent childhood, you created aspects of your consciousness that held information about the violence away from you. That's why you remember it as if it happened to someone else. You have many ways of being you.

Over and over, I thought, I needed to separate into parts in my head. I needed to separate into parts in my head, but I couldn't make sense of this. They were just words that didn't come together into something meaningful. A thought came up, I chased it and was able to hold on to it long enough to ponder it: I could not know this or something bad would have happened.

When David and I went to visit my mom, she treated me well and seemed interested in our lives, focusing less on what she needed from me or how I should be taking care of her. Mom saved those conversations for our daily phone calls because she thought David wouldn't find out about this other side other. But he could see the changes in me when I talked to my mom.

My mind instinctively developed new parts to specialize in skills I needed to make it through law school. They learned to focus on the important information: the outlines, the nutshells, and what each case meant.

I closed my hand into a fist and captured the details of the feeling for later, when I might need them. Storing thoughts in my fist was a way of creating parts of myself, brighter rooms in the house that was my mind, parts that could hold on to feelings of being loved.

I still didn't know very much about the complex coping mechanism that had helped me survive my childhood. It was as if my conscious mind wasn't strong enough yet to fully grasp that I had parts. I knew it superficially, but I didn't feel it all the way through.