From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.

Revenge is an admission of pain: a mind that is bowed by injury is not a great mind.

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

So young when the pain had begun Now forever afraid of being loved.

I grew up haphazard, wounded and tortured in mind, full of self-pity and hatred of others.

... I got to writing poetry out of revenge — self-pity and revenge.

I never loved my father, [he used to say,] but feared him. He was prone to rages and would resort to violence. My poor mother would then always be afraid for me. When I read Karl May once that it was a sign of bravery to hide one's pain, I decided that when he beat me the next time I would make no sound. When it happened – I knew my mother was standing anxiously at the door – I counted every stroke out loud. Mother thought I had gone mad when I reported to her with a beaming smile, 'Thirty-two strokes father gave me!' From that day I never needed to repeat the experiment, for my father never beat me again.

Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?

Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life. It wasn't like I didn't know where all this remembering got you, all that hunger for beauty and astonishing cruelty and ever-present-loss.

In my own therapy it was my experience that it was precisely the opposite of forgiveness —namely, rebellion against mistreatment suffered, the recognition and condemnation of my parents' destructive opinions and actions, and the articulation of my own needs— that ultimately freed me from the past.

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

جُرحتُ، منذ زمن بعيد.
وعشتُ لكي أثأر لنفسي
من والدي، ليس
بسبب ما كان عليه،
بل بسبب ما أنا عليه: منذ بدء الزمن
أيّام الطفولة، فكّرتُ
أنّ الألم يعني
أنني لم أكن محبوبة،
أنني كنتُ أحبّ.

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

I marked myself once with a knife. I was disappearing into the adolescent sea of rage and destruction. The mark of pain assured me of my own reality. The cut could speak. It had a voice that cried out when I could not make a sound in my defense. I never made such a mark again. Instead I chose to slash art onto canvas, pencil marks onto paper, and when I could no longer carry the burden of history, I found other openings. I found stories. (p91)