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Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass QUOTES

Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass QUOTES

1 " Life is not meant to be a montage of catastrophes. It’s also not a giant prison, and neither are these bizarre, meaty casings we are housed in for the time being. And they’d make terrible ones anyway. These bodies aren’t exactly built to last. They get sick and get old and fall apart. But truth is, the me that is me is not the sick one here. And I refuse to feel imprisoned. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

2 " I needed a time machine. I needed to run around the past and gather up all the old, unbroken parts of me and try to Frankenstein myself back together again. My healthy body, my unjaded sixteen-year-old heart, my baby brain. I may not make such a pretty monster, but at least I'd feel like myself again. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

3 " Fear is a bastard. Fear is an attention whore. I want to ask fear if it has mommy issues, because that’s the only reason I can think why it needs attention so bad. I want fear to get Parkinson’s. Then maybe fear will know how it feels to be on the run from something it doesn’t understand. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

4 " One minute, I'm a tragically average, fair and freckled eighth-grader with algebra homework. The next, I'm one who has swallowed liquor. I'm a rebel. I'm a line-crosser. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

5 " Whatever made this world and everything in it isn’t wrong, it’s miraculous. Typos are wrong. That’s about it. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

6 " I don't want to hide. I don't want to be alone. I don't want to wander off into the desert in shame and die and become vulture food. Or end up keeling over just because I'm too self-conscious to leave the house. Cause of Death: Unnecessary Loneliness. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

7 " When you're in the clutches of a drinking problem you don't really sit around thinking, I should really knock this shit off and go get my Eastern philosophy on. On your to-do list, pursuing a higher state of consciousness doesn't really rank. It's more like, put on Led Zeppelin 4 and hand me some of that Root Beer Schnapps. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

8 " Addiction, at its worst, is akin to having Stockholm Syndrome. You're like a hostage who has developed an irrational affection for your captor. They can abuse you, torture you, even threaten to kill you, and you'll remain inexplicably and disturbingly loyal. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

9 " We've all felt a little incompetent, insufficient, overexposed, helpless, unlovable, terrified, defective, unfit and unsung at times. And deep down, for whatever reason, you might even think you deserve to. Because why else would you be feeling that way. Like the world is laughing at you.

I promise you it's not. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

10 " I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up in a cold sweat thinking I’m being chased by a grunting, disfigured man wielding a hatchet. Usually we're at an abandoned campground, which leads me to believe this is a subconscious mashup of Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He never catches me. The only thing that ever happens is I'm running and he's chasing. It's pretty horrible. I know it’s not real, but it feels real, and you know how feelings are. They make everything real. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

11 " Rise up and lift your sword, peaceful warrior. Keep it strong and steady. You've already lived and fought a thousand battles, and you're not here—again—to cower in fear and pain. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

12 " It's amazing how fearless you can be when you want something bad enough, the lengths to which you'll go, the grit you'll put into the scheming and maneuvering. That's determination for you. I would have made a good bounty hunter. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

13 " One of the hardest things you'll ever do is give yourself permission to be in pain of any kind. There's a reason we have survival instincts, so that we don't die. That goes for humans, animals (redundant, I know), all the fishes in the sea, everyone. Some researchers even say that even plants feel pain and a cucumber will scream when you cut it. (And some others say that's crap because they have no brain or central nervous system.) The point is, we're all wusses. And emotional pain is the worst. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

14 " I'm in hell. I'm separate from everyone and everything. I'm John Travolta in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

15 " Hospice care? No, you must mean Frisbee game. Because there's no way my brother and I aren't outside right now playing Frisbee in the middlle of the street in the middle of summer and there are weird bugs everywhere no matter how much bug spray we put on ourselves and our mom is coming out to tell us for the third and final time, C'mon inside kids, it's getting dark. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

16 " I want to belong. Belonging makes things okay, and I want to be okay. I just want to be okay. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

17 " The panic was there, staring me down in the face, all the time, like I had a hoodie on backwards and I couldn't get it off. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

18 " One thing's for sure, everyone has something. Not everyone has a giant scar or a missing limb to show for it, but it's there. The indelible mark of that thing. It's that thing that will not just go away quietly. That thing you resent because it can't let one day go by without making you think about it no matter how hard you try, until you end up depressed/angry/drunk/isolated (at best), disassociated (middle) or utterly self-destructive (at worst). It's that thing that went and branded you without your permission. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

19 " An addict newly separated from their thing, whether it's drinking, drugs, throwing up ten times a day or anything else is like a person with no head. Your entire identity goes M.I.A. once you're no longer doing it. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

20 " I lead a double life. I'm John Wayne Gacy. I present myself in potentially awkward social situations as a laughing, colorful clown to gain your regard. If you ask my friends and neighbors, they will tell you I'm "normal" and that I "keep to myself." Meanwhile, there's a crawlspace in the basement where I've buried my secrets. It's starting to get pretty crowded down there, but they are mine. And there they'll stay. "

― Anne Clendening , Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass