Date read: April 2020
How strongly would I recommend? 8/10
Lasting Thoughts
The best illustration of what it’s like to feel anxiety that I’ve read. Discombobulated at times but beautifully written throughout. I related to the author’s struggles even though my life is considerably different than hers. A testament to the writing. We’re all going to struggle throughout our lives. Life doesn’t stop. It keeps coming and coming. Contending with that is a life-long endeavor.
Most Memorable Quote
“We must suffer alone. But we can at least hold our arms to our similarly tortured, fractured, and above all else, anxious neighbors, as if to say, in the kindest way possible. ‘I know …’”
Alain de Botton (The Book of Life)
For reference:
The bold highlights are my own emphasis
The blue highlights are passages I found noteworthy or interesting
The green highlights are passages I found to be well written
The First Bit
We put on a smile rather than tell friends we are desperately lonely
It’s the most incredible relief to know that we’re all wearing masks … and to see them slip on others. Oh, sweet Jesus, we’re not alone! We’re in this together! It’s not a mean-spirited schadenfreude; it’s the ultimate connection.
“We must suffer alone. But we can at least hold our arms to our similarly tortured, fractured, and above all else, anxious neighbours, as if to say, in the kindest way possible. ‘I know …’” — Alain de Botton’s (The Book of Life)
Sarah, you’re all striving, no arriving.
I take off my mask and share my not-knowing.
Because No One Knows …
Researchers have found that folk who eat more fermented foods (which contain gut-healing probiotics) have fewer symptoms of social anxiety.
Perhaps the problem, sometimes, is the notion that there is a problem.
— I must emphasize: learn, learn, learn. And be open to it all. This is pretty much the raison d’être, the joy of this journey.
For years I saw my life as a stacked spiral of dominoes, until I realized a stack is probably a better metaphor.
The more anxious we are, the more high-functioning we will make ourselves appear, which just encourages the world to lean on us more. — cruel irony #2
The Something Else
I do these retreats, but I tell you, every single time I arrive fidgety and cynical and worried about sharing bunk beds with strangers and doing partner-up-with-someone exercises.
— I hold on to my crap when truly confronted.
You know how dogs do that thing where they circle and circle, unable to find the spot where they feel comfortable enough to settle? That’s us. Most of the time. We wander about, filling up your weekends, creating never-ending to-do lists.
Life naturals. People immune to anxiety. They can see straight to the positive.
— They see a flower. And find it beautiful. That’s it.
— They don’t wonder if they’re liking it enough, or if the whole experience is a waste because today they’re too stressed to appreciate lovely things like flowers. Nor do they fear that the flower won’t last.
Gentle And Small
From the bath, I had a view of every moon that the cashed-up kids with their unicorn tatts down on the beach would bang drums to each month.
It’s never surprised me that sugar addiction goes hand in hand with anxiety, and that anxious folk hide the vice so protectively. We’re dopamine junkies, and we don’t like people removing our “fix.”
Ruth Whippman reckons the search for happiness is making anxiety worse because “the expectations of how happy you should be are is high, you always feel like you are falling short.”
Like the fight-or-flight response, the comfort system is also automatic and will do its job in toning down anxiety … if we learn to trigger it. Studies show that one of the best ways to trigger the comfort zone is to practice self compassion.
Write a “no bloody wonder” letter to your anxiety
— No bloody wonder you’re wobbly—you’ve been left in limbo for three days over a work outcome yet again. Plus you feel like you’re in a rut, unable to get a clear view on why you’re living.
— Yes, yes, I know it fell like it’s too hard. But you deal this use very time we land here. let’s just look back on it all for twenty-seven seconds. The shittiest days have always led somewhere. Haven’t they?
—- Last week we fretted all Saturday morning and it was a glorious day and we got paralyzed on the lounge-room floor and it was all such a wet of a glorious day. I know. I was there. And the fretting got worse and tighter. Until we cried. And it all felt good. And we realized we hadn’t cried for the bigness of life for too long. We had to fret to cry to release the pressure.
— So let’s just sit in this for a bit and see what happens. Let’s be totally grim together. Might as well. We’re here anyway. Cool. Okay then.
— You know what? I think you just need to go for a hike this weekend. Get into the bush.
As I sign off, Love, Sarah, I smile at my anxiety.
“It’s easier to do something every day, without exception, than to do something ‘most days.’ When you say ‘I’ll walk four days a week,’ you debate which four days, and wake up debating whether you can skip Tuesday.” — Gretchen Rubin
“Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it … almost every day, it’s not good any more.” — Andy Warhol
Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed there is nothing to fear but fear itself. I’m kind of saying the inverse. Don’t fear the fear. Instead, see it for what it is. You’re feeling anxious. You just are. No end to berate yourself for this; it will only make you more anxious.
Do the anxiety. Then leave it there. This is our challenge.
Just Meditate
After years of meditating, I’ve realized words and thought can only point to the experience. They are not the experience itself. Just as the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. Which can hurt the head when you try to think about it. So … Just meditate.
Thoughts are little pockets of stress that your consciousness encounters as it descends into calm. When you “think” them, the pockets of stress are released. Pop! And you return to the mantra. It’s seductively convincing to know my thoughts are all part of the process. I’m not fighting myself.
When people ask me for the “one thing” that’s helped with my anxiety, I tell them there’s been one thing. But if pressed, I conceded that meditation has steered me to most of the good things that have happened in the past seven years.
If you own a Macbook, you’ll know that suction-y, swooping thing the magnetic power cord does when it connects to the socket … Well, when—and if—I finally arrive at the full, expanded, settled spot I described above, that’s the sensation. Shwoop! I fit. I’m connected.
As I say, the thing about anxiety, it’s all head. So anything that gets us out of our heads is good. It works a different muscle.
The Something Else (Part 2)
We yearn for something even if we don’t know what it looks like or if it actually exists. — cruel irony #4
“Because there’s a silence and aloneness that accompanies a strong relationship with yourself. In that silence, we see the truth of our existence and the shortness of life. And this is painful.”
— “Also, when we come in close, we become larger … and this requires change. We become more visible, and thus more open to being touched by life, and thus more likely to be hurt.” — Irish poet & philosopher David Whyte.
We yearned our way to becoming human, We yearned our way out of our mom’s womb to oxygenated life. It’s painful: we scream as we push forward into it.
Bipolar
The hum of the sunlight on the concrete streets, the smell of people’s emotions around me.
I pitched my tent without a groundsheet and kind of just ended up submerged in water. I didn’t move; I stayed there all night in a numb suspension. And I can only say it was to see where it would lead me.
“I’m the sanest person I know.” But you can be sane, as in be perfectly cognizant of what’s going on, and be going mad. I wished I wasn’t sane, I really did. When you’re sane you have to witness the whole bloody unraveling with your eyes wide open.
I still have distinct manic episodes. My kite goes whooping up and up. I’m thinking and talking fast. I feel synchronicities. I’ll cry for days over the bigness of life. I get big ideas and have urges—to put a creative bomb under situations, to poke a conversation with a wild notion, to plunge into physically dangerous or promiscuous pursuits.
— I read somewhere that manic sex isn’t really intercourse. It’s discourse. An intense expressive outlet for contact and communication.
“If you’re not anxious, you’re not paying attention.” I’m the same.
Closer
“Every man rushes everywhere into the future because no man has arrived at himself” — Michel de Montaigne
As he wised up to this idea, she shared through his writing that freedom from the restless our beings could only be achieved by actively resisting the pull outward and into the future, and instead learning to “stay at home.”
— Home, in case Montaigne and I haven’t spelled it out well enough yet, is being ourselves. Our selves that sit on that little wooden bench, waiting for us to join them. Always.
I know now that my anxiety doesn’t have to because by anything particularly fear-inducing. At least not to the normal eye. After more than three decades of it coursing through my veins, anxiety is sometimes simply in my bones.
We rush to escape what makes us anxious, which makes us anxious, so we rush some more. — cruel irony #5
To this extent, I think anxiety and depression are different expressions of the same thing—a severe discomfort with what we can’t grasp, what we can’t know.
For me, I’m mostly anxious. Depression kicks in as an exhausted response when my anxiety goes way too far.
The depression I experience is faded Catholic-school-uniform maroon in color, moldy in vibe, and feels like head fog from sleeping on an electric blanket or sitting in a 1970s office suite the oozes stale cigarette stench from the nylon carpet.
— Anxiety, for me, is more painful by a long shot, but I prefer the shape pain to the muffling. it seems more productive.
“Ask yourself what ‘problem’ you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or in five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment?” — Eckhart Tolle (The power of now)
Real disasters are a cinch compared to the shit we make up in our heads. Actually, they’re a relief.
— When the future does arrive, we’re always okay. And I think my tendency to see out risky experience is about wanting to be reminded of this.
One guy put it to me that I always seem tone on my way to somewhere else. “It’s too intimidating to approach someone who might dart off on you,” he said. I truly hate that I trigger this feeling in others.
[In Paris] Hyper consumerism is deemed vulgar. Instead, they walk to streets merely to … wander and ponder. They call it a flanerie—a wandering walk.
— I love the spirit of it—sitting facing out to life. Then wandering among it. Then sitting back again. It’s thoroughly absorbing, which allows calm, paced, discerning thought bubbles to surface.
When I ask what anxious people get wrong, he’s emphatic. “They don’t give themselves time with their Inside People!”
— Uge tells me that we then feel where our inside peeps are at. Try saying to yourself, as he does, “Are we good? Are we comfortable? IS this where we should be? Is it making sense?”
—– “Don’t think or plan in this space, just check in.”
Spirals
The more banal the supposed trigger, the guiltier and more self-indulgent and pathetic we feel, thus adding to the anxious spiral. — cruel irony #6
The anxious tend to seek solitude, yet we simultaneously crave connection. — cruel irony #7
We can talk coherently and rationally about or anxiety, even joke about it, yet we freak out on a regular basis. — cruel irony #11
Anxious thoughts, apparently, have more pull in the brain than knowledge thoughts, so sensible facts and data go out the window when we’re panicking.
We seem doggedly set in our ways, but we have no idea what we want. – cruel irony #12
We look strong and controlling. But we actually need others’ help more than most. — cruel irony #13
“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.” — Jodi Picoult
*** Another simply thing you can do, dear-loved-one-of-somone-with-anxiety, is to just be there, patiently, when we wobble. Just stay. And be entirely certain and solid about doing so, even in the very convincing face of pushback and the frantic wobbliness from us. Your patience and calmness will exist in such start contrast to our funk that we’ll start to feel silly and return to Earth. Our anxiety does pass.
We anxious folk are fierce in our self-protection. We don’t want our ‘fix” to be taken away. And we’re very seductive in the art of pushing people away. I know I test others, to see if they can handle me. I think that’s it. Or perhaps I’m just testing for sturdiness.
When we fuss and fret about getting wrinkles out of the bed, and ask you to double-check that you turned off the taps when you get up to go to the bathroom in the night, and ask you to stick to plans and call when you say you will, we’re trying to control everything the we think might go wrong and that could trigger a spiral and ruin our time together. We’re truly not aiming to control you.
Make The Beast Beautiful
“He who has a why can endure any how.” — Nietzsche
“Yes, I’ve got these conditions—anxiety, depression, addiction—and they almost killed me. But they are also my superpowers. I’m the canary in the mine and you need my sensitivity because I can smell toxins in the air that you can’t smell, see trouble you don’t see and sense danger you don’t feel. My sensitivity could save us all. And so instead of letting me fall silent and die—why don’t we work together to clear some of this poison from the air?” — Glennon Doyle Melton
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” — Anais Nin
“The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.”
The fact that I lost everything at several stages in my life to my anxiety and related illness means I have little attachment to material outcomes. i actually don’t care about money. I don’t get around to spending it. Quite frankly, having it makes me anxious.
“The day I’m not nervous is the day I quit. To me, nerves are great. That means you care. — Tiger Woods.
“The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear .. while the coward runs. It’s the same thing, fear, but it’s what you do with it that matters.” — Mike Tyson’s trainer.
Pain Is Important
He smiled through his greasy glasses with his clear eyes. ‘Why do we all expect to be happy? We all come out of our mothers crying. Pain is what we do.”
“Happiness is generally impossible for longer than fifteen minutes. We are the descendants of greats who, above all else, worried.” — Alain de Botton (tweet)
Pete Kramer contends in Listening to Prozac that when we take drugs we don’t just medicate away our anxiety, we medicate away our souls.
— … I know anyone who’s been on anxiety medications had that cringey feeling at some point (every day?) that their drugs might be masking something important that really wants to express itself.
“The pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness … i’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word ‘happiness’ and to replace it with the word ‘wholeness.’ Ask yourself, ‘is this contributing to my wholeness?’ and if you’re having a bad day, it is.” — Hugh MacKay (The Good Life)
Do The Work
90% of success is about just turning up, she reckons. She feels crap some days, but she’ll commit to showing up at her yoga class, turning on her computer in the morning, saying “yes” to a request. When you get that far (to the yoga mat, to the desk), you’re most of the way there.
— [Once I start walking] I’ll mostly—actually always—find the pain and fogginess backs off and I want to go further. And with a bit more spring in my step. Showing up provides me with enough forward flow to keep things moving. You know, that’s how it goes with most things.
[On creative work]
*** “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, its just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work … It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” — Ira Glass
Being vulnerable is the greatest gift you can give a loved one. Brene Brown tells us this. Being vulnerable is saying “I love you” first, it’s doing something where there are no guarantees. It’s being willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. And it’s saying to tell your truth. When you do, it provides a glorious space for loved one—ora potential loved one—to step in and be their best person.
[on supplements]
Take an Epsom salt bath or try magnesium citrate or a topical magnesium gel. Vitamin D is worth looking into, ditto vitamin B6 and vitamin C. And zinc. And having your thyroid levels tested.
Indecision
“I remember a women telling me about when she came back from being an aid worker in Africa. Emotionally, she’d held it together while away, but broke down in the undies section of David Jones deciding between boy cut and bikini” — book publisher
“There would be no anxiety without possibility.” — Soren Kierkegaard
In fact, to be rendered choiceness is the ultimate freedom.
“Our life is frittered away by detail … simplify, simplify.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Think in the morning, act in the noon.” — William Blake
“Really, what difference does it make?” Dad philosophized, folding up the map. He was right. Wherever my little bother stabbed, we always wound up in a campground with an above-ground kidney-shaped pool and ate goulash that Mom made in advance and carried in the stinking hot car in a bit cast-iron pot and that we’d eat sitting on milk crates around the hero lamp.”
*** I flip a coin. But before I uncover it, I monitor my emotions to see what I’m hoping the result will be. There it is, my gut decision, peeking through my head clutter. This technique tricks you into thinking some divine intervention is going to make the decision and you switch to responding to the possible outcome. This switches off the decision-making muscle.
— What’s important about making a decision is the “just deciding” bit. Because once you choose one—say, the black dress—you make it the best choice.
We humans are master justifies. Failing to act on a decision, however, will haunt us. The infinite possibilities of what might have been get us into all kinds of anxious messes.
Back The Fuck Off
When I was nineteen I was mugged in Nice after hitchhiking to the French border from Florence. I was left with no backpack, no passport, no ID, no money, no credit card and with “only the clothes on my back”—a pair of jeans, black boots and a navy Sportscraft turtleneck (which I still wear).
— You know what? It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.
— I had no control. No agency. I was a passenger for two weeks. My anxiety had nothing to grip on to.
But it’s almost like it’s all so bad (a scarier monster), and so uncontrollable, I have to give in to the “is-ness” of it all. I’m rendered choiceness. I think, in some ways, this is why I live so nomadically. It keeps me in a perpetual state of being confronted with scarier, uncontrollable monsters.
Space
“[Space] is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration.” — Tim Kreider
Most of us cry out for more time, thinking that’s what we need (much like balance). But tell me when more time has helped anyone in a hot anxious mess? Time doesn’t release the pressure. Time doesn’t take the cap off the toothpaste. Time doesn’t loosen the knots. If we get time, we tend to just fill it with more thoughts.
— What we need is more space.
It’s only in the nothingness that we can see the somethingness.
Boundary Building
To stay on top of all the ideas and opportunities that Modern Life now afford us we have to keep multiple tabs open in our brains, which sees us toggle back and forth between tasks and commitments and thoughts.
The standard solution is to consume—food, possessions, partners, gurus. If our self-worth is suffering, we’re told to buy a new moisturizer. Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, writes, “We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.”
I eat coconut oil and ghee in stews and curries. And pour olive oil on my vegetables every night. A tablespoon or so. But when I’m worked up, I increase the amount. Oil nourishes and warms us.
— We need fat to be densely nourished.
Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries. — cruel irony #16
Even before meeting me she could tell that I was hyper vigilant and over toggled and leaned into life with a ferocity that frightens most people and that I try to tame, but also know is a beast worthy of being called beautiful at times. It reflected on her maturity and wisdom that she acknowledged she was in the same camp. She was reaching out, as if to say, in the kindest way possible: “I know …”
“People think that because they’ve spent five seconds firing off an email asking something of me, they deserve a response that will take me 25 minutes to research and compose. It doesn’t weigh up.” — friend James.
Further, another study published in Psychological Science found that the more possessions—“an embarrassment of riches”—reduces our ability to enjoy simple things, like sunsets and chocolate. The awareness of having stuff distracts us from basic pleasure.
Do the journey. Do the work. Do the little right moves. The treasure comes.
The Wobbliest Table At The Cafe
I learned that anxiety widens personal space—we need more than the standard 8-16 inches that the average person requires to feel comfortable.
“It’s not stress that makes you stressed. The experience of being human is what makes you stressed.” — friend Kerry
— Kerry’s someone who can pull back and see the forest when I’m tangled in the trees.
Apparently, when we emerged from the primordial soup our gnarly old amygdala evolved from our olfactory bulb and both now sit in the deep core of our noggins. Anxiety, then, can see our emotional system get intertwined with the olfactory processing system. So smells easily—and instantly—are associated with certain fears.
Monachopisis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach—lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.
I stared into nothingness, sitting in the warmth. And then, I kid you not, I saw a dog turd rolling up the path. I looked closer. A beetle not much bigger than a ladybug was pushing the dried shit uphill. With his hind legs. I watched it for an hour, laughing on my own, resisting the urge to pick the damn thing up and put it at the top of the path for the poor beetle. That would have ruined the perfect metaphor.
When we choose to go grim and lo-fi like this we low our usual expectations, so that simple joys—sunlight, the stillness, the glow of the open fire, a turn being pushed uphill-become wonderfully apparent. With lower expectations there’s less imperative to make things perfect. We can release our grip. We are in life, in its flow. We’re sitting with ourselves. We let out a sigh.
You can spend lot of energy avoiding wobbly tables. And you can fuss about with folded up bits of newspaper. But then, once the table is stabilized, you notice that smoke from the smokers at the next table is blowing right into your face. So you switch seats. Now you’re in the path of the gale-faced fan blowing in the corner. And your toast arrives burnt. And on and on it can go.
— In psychology circles this kind of experimenting is called “distress tolerance” and entails working with your specialist to remain in anxiety-provoking situations until your fear capacity becomes exhausted. Which it does.
Time, as they say, is the only cure for a broken heart.
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke extolled the soul-expanding power of difficulty and urged us to “arrange our life according to that principle which councils us that we must always hold to the difficult.”
— What we resist persists.
— What we sit in eventually fades to a manageable and livable volume.
— When we go low, we come in close and it leads us to the truth of it all.
“If man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in anxiety … the greater the anxiety, the greater the man. He therefore who has learned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.” — Soren Kierkegaard
“The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.” — David Brooks.
*** Wabi-sabi has no direct translation in English. But the first is the finding of beauty in imperfection and impermanence, as well as the cycles of messy growth and crumbling decay. This is because that’s the way life just foes. And nonresistance IS beautiful. Although the beauty absolutely comes form our nonresistant reaction.
— Through wabi-sari we learn to embrace our uneven eyebrows, wobbly tables and a nervous need tap the bathroom door 16 times (four sets of four) after shitting it.
—– Because it is what it is.
Innovation consultant Chris Barez-Brown writes in How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas that ruts are best broken with small amounts of whimsy, not seismic changes in behaviour. Which is mental muscle building written differently. Counting men with moustaches on the way to the bus stop is enough to shift perspective, he says.
… it did get me focused on acknowledging that I simply don’t like doing a lot of what other people like doing. And over time, I got more and more okay with, and less and less about, this.
Grace
Grace doesn’t bring a part to town. It’s not happiness. It’s not a fleeting high. It’s a delicate, yet whole, gift that whispers in our ear, “Life has this one covered.” It tells us that things fit. That you fit. You can’t try t get it, you can’t earn it or deserve it. It just is. Just as a flower doesn’t try to bloom. It just does.
David Brooks feels deeply that the endpoint of the anxious journey is the acquiring of character.
— “Many people don’t come out hearted; they come out different.”
*** “The thing about life, sweetheart, is this, when we leap into the unknown, we always land safely. We just do. We free fall for a bit. But then, as if we’re falling, we grow angle wings the carry us to our destination. Life supports us; it always does. The problem is, we all want to go out and buy ourselves a set of angel wings first. Before we jump. But, sweetheart, there’s no such thing as an angel wing shop.” — friend Sky.
Her simple answer—hindsight. She was now 35 and, she said, she’d simply had enough rough patches from which she emerged okay. These eventually stack up and create a picture. That life will turn out okay.
[Prema Chodron] argues that the journey we all need to do is the experiment with sitting in uncertainty. Ha! The ultimate endpoint, she writes, is growing up. The journey “offers no promise of happy endings.” Rather the part of ourselves that keeps seeking security (when there isn’t any) and something to hold on to (when such a thing doesn’t exist) finally grows up. She says anyone who faces these truths is a true warrior.
The Last Bit
But—oh glory be—by being in anxiety, by going down to the dark depths, we finally find the connection. Because anxiety, eventually and inevitably, makes us sit in our shit. It takes us there, to the darkness. It forces us to do the journey. And only then can we see what we were looking for. We can see the truth. We seat all as it is.
“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.” — W.B. Yeats
Kierkegaard reckoned that anxiety is an ‘adventure that every human being must go through.” And Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” I disagree. Not everyone wants the adventure. Not everyone wants to life the scab. But those of us who do need the new conversation.
To ride a big wave you first have to paddle out hard to get behind the point where they start breaking. You have to fire up and give it your all.If you do it half-heartedly, you’ll get smashed, and you’ll be pushed back into the churning whitewash over and over.
David Brooks wrote that those who mark on the road to character as he puts it, or the path to meaning and sense, as I’m putting it, don’t come out healed. They come out different.
— I don’t sit here healed. I sit here simply knowing that I’m on a better journey. And this is enough. This is everything.
I notice coincidences and don’t place too much importance in them. i just find them funny, like the fact that a body early-summer Sydney storm has erupted as I write these final lines. I can say “i love you” and I know that I love loving.
— I’m getting better at knowing what to care about. Again, anxiety is my compass. If I’m anxious, I know I’m going the wrong way.
“Give up on yourself. Begin taking action now while being neurotic or imperfect. — Shoma Morita
Recommended Books
“The Three Marriages” — David Whyte
“The Conscious Mind” — David Chalmers
[Know thyself better books]
“The Road the Character” — David Brooks
“Your Voice in my Head” — Emma Forrest
“The Fry Chronicles” — Stephen Fry
“Monkey Mind” — Daniel Smith
“Reasons to Stay Alive” — Matt Haig
“My Age of Anxiety” — Scott Stossel
“The Bell Jar” — Sylvia Plath
“An Unquiet Mind” — Kay Redfield Jamison
“M Train” — Patti Smith
“Book of Longing” — Leonard Cohen
“The Noonday Demon” — Andrew Solomon
New Words
confected
irascible
slovenliness
acerbically
buttressing
treacle
caper
viscera
esprit de lescalier
polemic
ostensibly
veritable
proffering
faffing
ablutions
languidness
plaited
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