Kallissa Bailey

“Catherine was right. Estrangement is not freeing. It has not felt joyful. It has not been happy. It has only felt necessary, and even that is something I question all the time: Does this make me selfish? Does it make me cruel? Then I think of the Thao Nguyen lyric, You made a cruel kid. Come look what you did.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“Four months later, I got my diagnosis. And now that my past was spilling over, exploding, a volcano spewing hot toxic waste all over my present life, it was all I could think about.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“He didn’t answer. He’d stopped calling months ago, now that I’d helped resolve his relationships with his family. I waited and I waited. My phone stayed silent.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“In Gretchen Schmelzer’s excellent, gentle book, Journey Through Trauma, she insists on the fifth page: “Some of you may choose a therapist: a psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, counselor, or member of the clergy. Some of you may choose some form of group therapy. But I am telling you up front, at the beginning: in order to heal, you will need to get help. I know you will try to look for the loophole in this argument—try to find a way that you can do this on your own—but you need to trust me on this. If there were a way to do it on your own I would have found it. No one looked harder for that loophole than I did.”[1]”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma