Imagine trying to live without air. Now imagine something worse.

— Amy Reed

I’m feeling really hopeful about it, like maybe I actually have a chance to get better. To be happy. It’s funny, I just realized that my whole life, the whole time I’ve been trying to be perfect, I never once considered happiness as part of the equation. I guess it seemed so impossible I couldn’t even let myself fantasize about it. But now, I don’t know, things feel different somehow. Like impossible things might not be so impossible.

— Amy Reed

I said just let me try one more time, and she said, "THAT'S ENOUGH, ISABEL," again, and she could just say it over and over, and it would never get through my thick skull because I'm always wanting and wanting because nothing is ever enough you are never enough I am never enough I am never enough I AM NEVER ENOUGH.

— Amy Reed

I think before I ever became an alcoholic, before I even tasted alcohol or tried drugs, I was already programmed to be this way. Before there was cocaine or vodka or sex or any of that, there was fantasy. There was escape. That was my first addiction. I remember being a little kid and imagining everything different, myself different. How did I get the idea in my head at age eight that everything was better somewhere else? Why would a child have a hole inside that can’t get full no matter what she does? The real world could never make me happy, so I retreated to the world inside my head. And as I grew, as the real world proved itself more and more painful, the fantasy world expanded.

— Amy Reed

I wonder if anybody else feels this way, if anyone in here is as scared as I am. Are they as sad and angry and confused and ashamed? Is that even possible? Is it even possible for one building to hold all that pain?

— Amy Reed

Phones are only good for ordering pizza and telling someone you're running late

— Amy Reed

Shirley: "Christopher, would you like to tell Olivia what "F.I.N.E" means?" Christopher: "Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional"... Olivia: "But what if you really do feel fine?" Shirley: "Christopher, care to answer that?" Christopher: "Um, there's no such feeling as fine.

— Amy Reed

That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.

— Amy Reed

The first week is the hardest. Then little by little the world opens up, and you realize there are all these people around you with their own needs that have nothing to do with you. Then you forget, and everything’s about you again. And maybe that cycle continues for the rest of your life. Maybe the world keeps expanding and contracting. Maybe you know you’re well when it finally stays the same size.

— Amy Reed

There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. Furthermore, she is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.

— Amy Reed