While You Were Out Quotes

“But I was learning that you can’t fast-forward through grief or read a CliffsNotes version of your life and expect to make peace with it.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“Trauma does that to you. It steals your memory. I either couldn’t or didn’t let myself remember her or talk about her.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“It’s okay to be disappointed, but don’t get discouraged. I”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“More than a quarter of the nation’s 559,000 homeless have a serious mental illness. Their average life span is ten to twenty years shorter than the general population.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“Yet this kind of prejudice and discrimination is allowed to fester because the aggrieved are either too embarrassed to speak up or we choose to ignore them.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“Despite the way they are often portrayed in popular culture, people with severe mental illness are rarely dangerous. In fact, they are more likely to be a victim of a violent crime than to cause one.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“some people who are too sick to realize that they are ill can be a danger to themselves or others and need someplace safe to stay until they are better. As uncomfortable as it is to acknowledge that, it’s equally irresponsible to ignore.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“I don’t think he meant to hurt us. He just didn’t know how not to.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“the crude disposal of my mother’s family belongings felt like another kick in the gut, like the things we valued were little more than garbage.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“This is what telling your story can do, she told them. It can bring the dead back to life—not in the same way but as a kind of transformation. It doesn’t take away the injury, but it can give you a feeling of power when you are in control of the narrative. The balance is shifted back to you. There’s new life, resurrected.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“you can’t fast-forward through grief or read a CliffsNotes version of your life and expect to make peace with it.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“I’d never paused to understand what it must have been like for my mother to raise all those kids more or less on her own, with her own paralyzing bouts of depression and anxiety and a husband who often was absent, drunk, or out of control.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“If I was going to move on, I’d need to find a way to forgive my mother, just as she had forgiven me for my many faults and misdeeds over the years.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“people who live through trauma like the kind our family experienced tend to develop anxiety about being away. We become deeply vigilant.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“It’s okay to be disappointed, but don’t get discouraged.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“For every person with severe mental illness, there are dozens of others whose lives are upended by their disease”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“It was easier to gaslight me than own up to their own reckless acts.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“If we acted like we were having fun, maybe it would come true.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“It’s not always easy to look past the label of someone’s illness to see the person they are inside,” I told the crowd in church that afternoon. “If you could do that with Georgia, you were in for a treat. She was one of the smartest, funniest, and most generous people around. I loved her.”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

“In steering me back to that time, I have been forced to look at the girl I was then and, knowing what I do about myself now, be able to reframe and understand why I did this,”
― Meg Kissinger, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence