The Choice

「We are hungry for approval, attention, affection. We are hungry for the freedom to embrace life and to really know and be ourselves.」

「No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization.」

「I also want to say that there is no hierarchy of suffering. There’s nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours, no graph on which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus another.」

「Often, the little upsets in our lives are emblematic of the larger losses; the seemingly insignificant worries are representative of greater pain.」

「”Editke,” my teacher says, “all your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside.“」

「Maybe every childhood is the terrain on which we try to pinpoint how much we matter and how much we don’t, a map where we study the dimensions and the borders of our worth.」

「”Dicuka,” she says into the dark on night, “listen. We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.”」

「Food fantasies sustained us at Auschwitz. Just as athletes and musicians can become better at their craft through mental practice, we were barracks artists, always in the thick of creating. What we made in our minds provided its own kind of sustenance.」

「The drooping, browning carrot tops are proof of a secret power. I shouldn’t have risked picking them, but I did. I shouldn’t have survived, but I did. The “shoulds” aren’t important. They aren’t the only kind of governance. There’s a different principle, a different authority at work.」

「Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.」

「I had written about imagining myself onstage at the Budapest opera house the night I was forced to dance for Mengele. Frankl wrote that he had done something similar at Auschwitz-in his worst moments, he had imagined himself a free man, giving lectures in Vienna on the psychology of imprisonment. He had also found a sanctuary in an inner world that both shielded him from his present fear and pain, and inspired his hope and sense of purpose-that gave him the means and a reason to survive.」

「But I also felt drawn to Carl Jung’s vision of therapeutic analysis: It is a matter of saying yea to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes in all its dubious aspects-truly a task that taxes us to the most.」

「That is the gift of my divorce: the recognition that I have to face up to what’s inside me. If I am really going to improve my life, it isn’t Bela or our relationship that has to change. It’s me.」

「The truth is, we will have unpleasant experiences in our lives, we will make mistakes, we won’t always get what we want. This is part of being human. The problem-and the foundation of our persistent suffering-is the belief that discomfort, mistakes, disappointment signal something about our worth. The belief that the unpleasant things in our lives are all we deserve.」

「Perfectionism is the belief that something is broken-you. So you dress up your brokenness with degrees, achievements, accolades, pieces of paper, none of which can fix what you think you are fixing. In trying to combat my low self-esteem, I was actually reinforcing my sense of unworthiness. In learning to offer my patients total love and acceptance, I fortunately learned the importance of offering the same to myself.」

「He behaved more like a drill sergeant than a supportive husband or concerned father. He dodn’t ask questions; he ran an interrogation. He didn’t acknowledge his fears or vulnerabilities; he asserted his ego.」

「Was I at one with my inner dancing girl? Was I living with her curiosity and ecstasy?」

「When we grieve, it’s not just over what happened-we grieve for what didn’t happen. I housed a year of horror within me. And I housed a vacant, empty place, the vast dark of the life that would never be. I held the trauma and the absence, I couldn’t let go of either piece of my truth, nor could I hold either easily.」

「At every selection line, the stakes were life and death, the choice was never mine to make. But even then, in my prison, in hell, I could choose how I responded, I could choose my actions and speech, I could chooose what I held in my mind. I could choose whether to walk into the electrified barbed wire, to refure to leave my bed, or I could choose to struggle and live, to think of Eric’s voice and my mother’s strudel, to think of Magda beside me, to recognize all I had to live for, even amid the horror and the loss.」

「Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal is to cherish the wound.」

「How easily a life can become a litany of guilt and regret, a song that keeps echoing with the same chorus, with the inability to forgive ourselves. How easily the life we didn’t live becomes the only life we prize. How easily we are seduced by the fantasy that we are in control, that we were ever in control, that the things we could or should have done or said have the power, if only we had done or said them, to cure pain, to erase suffering, to vanish loss. How easily we can cling to-worship-the choices we could or should have made.」

「Work has set me free. I survived so that I could do my work. Not the work the Nazis meant-the hard labor of sacrifice and hunger, of exhaustion and enslavement. It was the inner work. Of learning to survive and thrive, of learning to forgive myself, of helping others to do the same. And when I do this work, then I am no longer the hostage or the prisoner of anything. I am free.」

「I reminded myself that I was there to share the most important truth that I know, that the biggest prison is in your own mind, and in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are-human, imperfect, and whole.」

「Standing on a stage surrounded by the next generation of freedom fighters, I could see in my conscious awareness something that is often elusive, often invisible: that to run away from the past or to fight against our present pain is to imprison ourselves. Freedom is in accepting what is and forgiving ourselves, in opening our hearts to discover the miracles that exist now.」

「And here you are. Here you are! In the sacred present. I can’t heal you-or anyone-but I can celebrate your choice to dismantle the prison in your mind, brick by brick. You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now. My precious, you can choose to be free.」