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“And after all, what individual had I been before? What identity was there to erase with my newfound house-pride? I had never found one resilient enough to live on in my memory once it had gone. There had never been one real enough to miss. I disappeared with perfect peace.” (Acts of Desperation Quotes)
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“And that’s something to recommend love: that is has clear rules like a game, and it has speeches and sayings you’ll have heard in films and in songs. There are patterns and there are steps to be taken. If you lose the game that’s one thing, and that has to be dealt with, but at least there is a game to be played at all.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“Being with other people was, to me, the feeling of being realised. This was why I wanted to be in love. In love, you don’t need the minute-to-minute physical presence of the beloved to realise you. Love itself sustains and validates the rotten moments you would otherwise be wasting while you practise being a person, pacing back and forth in your shitty apartment, holding off till seven to open the wine.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“For me, food was messier, more complex. It was stressful, yes, but could be joyful too, something to binge on, and then shy away from; something to wrestle with, and offer up, and bury.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“How impoverished my internal life had become, the scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn’t want to offer it.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I am all at once submerged in every body i ever was, all the failed attempts at being a certain kind of person. My old scales are there, my old photographs, the skin across my face taut with hunger, my eyes bright and wild with it, very beautiful, nobody could deny.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I could not be alone happily, and because I knew this was a sign of weakness, I forced myself to endure it for as long as I could before breaking, although I sometimes thought I would go mad.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I didn’t want her near me, because she was the only one able to see me for what I was, but I couldn’t lose her for the very same reason.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I envy women who are removed. I never really had that luxury.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I felt crushed with the certainty that i was the crazy one.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I had carefully created a circumstance in which a kind of love could be bred in him, like a scientist manipulating lab conditions.” (Acts of Desperation Quotes)
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I hadn’t known until that moment how delicately I had been keeping everything inside me together those last few months. My body felt as though it had been holding its breath for a very long time and has just realised it couldn’t do so for ever.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I just wanted a wishy-washy platonic ideal of us as a family. It was something I thought of when I thought about death, that if I had to die, I would want to sit with the two of them one more time together, to eat as our original, own family, that if I could do so one last time I would be able to feel peaceful and whole.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I made mistakes like this all the time, seeking affirmation from the very worst people, so that what I must have been after deep down was confirmation of the fears instead of their dismissals”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I missed whole days huddling in my bed, scrolling through my phone without pleasure or intent, locked into its repetition as a safeguard.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I pleaded with him to see how small I really was. I said through my huddling and hiding that I was nothing, and I was happy to be nothing if nothing was what pleased him best.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I really was happy when I seemed happy. I am incapable of lying about my feelings, it’s only that the feelings have no coherence, are not continuous from one hour to the next.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I tried to remember his face, and found that the intensity of my crush would not allow me to. I could recall individual parts but when I tried to assemble them they floated in a shimmering mess.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I turned my face to the side and stared out my window. I was filled not only with misery about what he was saying, and his awareness of it, but also with shame at how squalidly I was wasting my short life. I was sitting in a car with someone who loved me more than life itself, and yet all I could think about was Ciaran. How impoverished my internal life had become, the scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn’t want to offer it.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I was not without value, but the value I held was not the kind I wanted to hold, and I did not know how to exchange it.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I wished I could unburden myself but I couldn’t verbalise what was happening because doing so would bring it into existence. So far, it was all taking place in my head with no verification from an outside party, and so long as I kept it that way I could suppress it.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I wondered how they always knew that I was someone to be hurt. Even when I didn’t tell them to, they knew somehow that there was part of me that accepted or desired it.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“I would always look like a misshapen version of my True Self, a hastily sketched approximation of a human being.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“In these moments I knew that if I could be smaller, smaller, less and less, if I could be tided, then he would love me fully and properly; and that anybody – oh everybody – would.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“It was a sight which taught me that a woman’s nudity was not always erotic, not even always pleasant, was, indeed, at times pathetic to behold.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“It was already so near to impossible to say no to a man, so difficult to accept the possibility of being hurt or disliked or shouted at. It takes so much out of you to make yourself say no when you have been taught to say yes, to be accommodating, to make men happy.” (Acts of Desperation Quotes)
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“It was already so near to impossible to say no to a man, so difficult to accept the possibility of being hurt or disliked or shouted at. It takes so much out of you to make yourself say no when you have been taught to say yes, to be accommodating, to make men happy. Once you’ve said no, a man wheedling feels unbearable. Even if he does it politely, or gently, it overrides the clearly expressed intention. It says: Your choice does not really matter. What I desire matters, and I don’t want to feel bad for forcing you into it. So perhaps you ought to reconsider?”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do. And it’s a peculiarly impotent sort of anger that domestic labour brings about. It was building up in me, a feeling like the blood of my body slowly becoming dirty as it coursed through.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“Living alone, I began to split apart from myself in a deeper and more grotesque way than ever before.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“Living with him forced me to treat myself like a person in a way I was not able to alone.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“My understanding was that every action would lead me to where I ought to be ultimately, and where I ought to be was in love. Love was the great consolation, would set ablaze the fields of my life in one go, leaving nothing behind. I thought of it as the great leveller, as a force which would clean me and by its presence make me worthy of it.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“Sometimes this distance between everyone comforted and pleased me. I would die knowing things about myself that nobody else on earth did. they were experiences that lived only in me and could never be replicated or recounted. And sometimes, like now, the distance seemed too sad to live with.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“That sort of watching is almost as good as being drunk if you do it enough, the jokes mild, the story always much the same, the ending always coming good.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“The pleasure wasn’t often pleasure; it was release from pain. It was binding yourself and feeling good when the bandages came off, it was cutting a hole in your leg so it could feel it heal. I had suffered, and I had made the suffering into something I could consider good. I made it so that suffering was a kind of work.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“There is no better feeling to me than to wake up in the middle of the night and thrust my hand out and say, half in a dream still, ‘I love you so much,’ and for a person to turn towards me from muscle memory and say through their own sleep, ‘I love you too.’ There’s never been a drug or a friend or a food that’s even come close.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“They weren’t star-crossed, just dithering, dependant people who couldn’t stay away from each other because they hadn’t worked out how to imagine anything different.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“To demand ownership of a woman who doesn’t love you, even when she is dead. To take that dead body and make it yours through hideous force, hideous care, hideous attention. It seemed to sum up all the ways in which men could take you without your permission and turn you into something you had never been, which had nothing to do with you.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“Was I feeling something true from within myself, or was I living out a fantasy I had assembled?”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“What I was feeling was the failure of superstition and charms – the unreliability of prayer.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“What must it feel like to be beautiful but also invisible whenever you choose to be? To be a beautiful man?”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“You always think your pain is the most painful. You always think it’s uniquely awful.” (Acts of Desperation Quotes)
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“You can’t complain about feeling bad, about being depressed, if you aren’t trying to sleep, trying to eat, trying to care about yourself.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
“You could tell these nights before they had started usually, some air of mischief in the room when we began to drink. We threw back the first drinks, greedily anticipating the coming looseness and hysteria. There were things we had expected to have by now that we did not have.”
Megan Nolan
Acts of Desperation
