Eggshell Skull Quotes

“I read once that the human body slowly pushes shrapnel back out through the skin. That a shard of metal can take years to reach the surface and finally truly be expelled. Veterans get bits coming out of them decades after wars. Could the same thing happen to memories? Perhaps that was what I was feeling: an itchy, irksome thing, a foreign object inside me, moving just millimeters every year, tearing through me until it breached.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“How could I tell him what was actually eating at me, rotting on the inside? How could I do that to my mother and father—make them as sad as I knew they’d be? At least if I carried my Secret alone, there would be only one casualty.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Driving and sex are both privileges granted at certain ages, both can do irreparable damage when done recklessly, but only driving requires tests, checkpoints and licences. I don’t understand why the government—at schools and through public education programs—doesn’t teach people about consent the way we teach them about drink-driving. After all, overconsumption of alcohol often leads to horrific consequences in both activities. Why can a man be charged with negligent, reckless driving after getting himself drunk, but he can argue that the same level of voluntary intoxication led him to honestly and mistakenly believe a woman consented to intercourse, and be acquitted of a rape charge accordingly?”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“The majority of rapists aren’t actually repeat offenders; they’re not afflicted with an uncontrollable lust. Mostly they’re regular men, with otherwise regular sexual preferences, who see an opportunity and take it.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Judges tell juries: if a defendant lies, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s guilty, but if a woman is crying as she dials triple zero after being raped, she might just be putting on a show.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“...I'd felt dread about how average and suburban Brisbane seemed. The normalcy was stifling and that I yearned for bigger things, that I missed New York.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“found it very difficult to determine my worth independent of him. Since puberty I had accepted, as a fact of my existence, that I wasn’t worth anything; that the ugly thing was ever-present inside me. That it was the dark truth, a rotten core, and that the smiling daytime Bri was the facade. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that so many of the feelings I struggled with are perfectly normal for abuse and trauma survivors.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“It’s the ultimate terror—perhaps the worst form of gaslighting—for a woman who complains of being raped to be told she isn’t desirable enough for that to be true.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Why didn’t he think about how it would affect me? To molest a child is to completely disregard their humanity. Their personal and physical autonomy. To commit irreparable damage to a still-soft, still-forming mind.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“He had deposited an experience into my lifetime, and that experience was now a memory I couldn’t forget, but it wasn’t an unknowable, mysterious, evil thing. There was space inside me for it to live alongside all my other memories and thoughts and feelings. I would never beat the demon, I could not exorcise it, I would simply learn to live above it.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Every act of sexual abuse is either deliberately or negligently cruel: each involves a terrified victim whose life experience an abuser completely devalues.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“In Australia, where more than one in ten women have been sexually assaulted before they turn fifteen”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“They weren’t children anymore either, and juries aren’t kind to women unless they’re ‘perfect victims’.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“It wasn't just him in the same way it wasn't just me. It was because I was sick of men like him. Because I'd seen them all, each as unoriginal in their selfishness as the next.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“The ugly parts of my life kept crashing into the beautiful ones.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Finally feminist enough to realise I was all out of ducks to give.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“pleasantries with a man”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Finally feminist enough to realise I was all out of fucks to give”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“verdict?”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“flood,”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“There were so many moments of bartering my autonomy for his affection. I oscillated between convincing myself he didn't really love me and feeling terror at the prospect that he did. I didn't know how to just be in love”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“went”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“There were so many moments of bartering my autonomy for his affection. I oscillated between convincing myself he didn't really love me and feeling terror at the prospect that he id. I didn't know how to just be in love.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“in a window. So big. So ugly. So fucking stupid.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“I wondered how much more 'crazy' he could take. I was unravelling as I tried to reckon with my past, but I felt as if I had to get my shit together and be a good, chill girlfriend before I told him everything in case he thought I was all too much. I imagined things he could say: ''I didn't sign up for this shit. We're so young, I don't want to get stuck dealing with you and all this. This isn't fun anymore.' 'I don't feel the same way about you now.' If I fixed up the other parts of my life, fixed my body, then perhaps I wouldn't be such a crap package. I thought if I was hot enough he'd be attracted to me regardless of the damage.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“there drinking until I used the”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Women in relationships with men all like to think that we'd leave them if they struck us, but mainly we hope we never have to test our resolve.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“put the bottle”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“I scrambled back to the bedside”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“WHEN A WOMAN COMPLAINS OF mistreatment by a man,”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull