All of the drama with my family and me and my mom and the separation between us and all that crazy stuff - I actually wrote about that. I have a song called 'Dear Mom,' and it's about the trials and tribulations with my mom, so I wrote about that and just everything that I've been through.
I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
We become imprisoned by our memories, and that makes our lives wretched.
When I was a child, fear was common to my life - fear of having nothing to eat, fear of the other children taunting me at school because I was illegitimate, and particularly fear of the big bombers appearing overhead and dropping their lethal bursts from the sky.
I was telling some people in my dressing room some of my other stories, my psychotic break, and blah, blah, blah, and no, they kind of look at you and it's just not what they wanted to hear.
The mother condemned for a witch and burnt with dry wood, and her children gazing on; The hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the fence, blowing and covered with sweat, The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, The murderous buckshot and the bullets, All these I feel or am.
Since I was born I wanted to entertain and communicate. I wanted to communicate so badly ... My sixth-grade math teacher taped my mouth. I'm still out to get her [for that]. It was very traumatizing!
Anybody who says, 'My childhood was completely happy,' is a person who isn't remembering the truth.
How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?
My wife is a former homicide detective, LAPD. The wonderful thing that I was able to capture is my wife's experiences from human and professional, and how do you deal with some of the atrocities that happen in L.A. and not bring them home.
...Things happened when you were little. Things you don't remember now, and don't want to. But they need to escape, need to worm their way out of that dark place in your brain where you keep them stashed.
There was not a lot of great Civil War literature written by people who participated in it. It was too traumatic.
Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.
And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.
People say you need to be strong, smart, and lucky to survive hard times, war, a natural disaster, or physical torture. But I say emotional abuse—anxiety, fear, guilt, and degradation—is far worse and much harder to survive.
You know, those kinds of things in your life...movies you try to work out your issues, then you realize those kinds of traumatic issues just stay with you forever and they just keep reoccurring, and no matter how hard I try to get them out of my head, they just sort of stay there.
...and trauma had a way of burning memories deeper into the mind.
At the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.
My parents were wonderful people, but there were terrible rows between them, and at times I found the atmosphere at home unbearable. The Arthur Ransome books gave me an alternative childhood and the tools to escape.
Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.
Often, particularly with voices, you're hearing horrible things, demon voices, and voices telling them that they're not worth it or that they're going to kill somebody. In those moments, they're overcoming things.
In my experience, the men of World War II, the vets of Vietnam, even guys coming back from Iraq, are loath to talk about their experiences. And the survivors of the Holocaust, particularly, are often very close-mouthed about their stories, even to their own children.
...This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed. Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]." Things that cut off, that ended abruptly or died--like parents and marriages--kept hurting forever.
Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.
A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression.
