First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety
Sarah Wilson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“It can be a good thing, too, to learn to sit in your own weirdness.”
“I said earlier that making decisions is a key anxiety trigger, If we drill down a bit we can see that this happens because we work to the belief there's a perfect decision out there to be made. But such a thing doesn't exist. And clutching at something that doesn't exist is enough to send anyone into a drowning panic.”
“One of the dear, dear things about getting older, is that it does eventually dawn on you that there is no guidebook. One day it suddenly emerges: No one bloody gets it! None of us knows what we're doing. Thing is, we all put a lot of effort into looking like we did get the guide, that of course we know how to do this caper called life. We put on a smile rather than tell friends we are desperately lonely. And we make loud, verbose claims at dinner parties to make everyone certain of our certainty. We're funny like that.”
“The more anxious we are, the more high-functioning we will make ourselves appear, which just encourages the world to lean on us more.”
“Anais Nin writes that anxiety can kill love. “It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.” Ain’t that the truth. I see that look on others’ faces when I’m drowning in one of my spirals. I know that many of the loved ones I’ve turned to, or allowed in to witness me in this state, have had to swim away from me and look after themselves, leaving me to drown. I’ve always feared that they think I’m going to strangle them emotionally with my complexity. So I usually send them on myself. Sometimes, though, when I put in the work, my anxiety has seen love grow, not die. And so, anxiety can be the very thing that pushes us to become our best person. When worked through, dug through, sat through, anxiety can get us vulnerable and raw and open. And oh so real.”
“Many of us with anxiety don’t look like we’ve got a problem because outwardly we function ludicrously well. Or so the merry story goes. Our anxiety sees us make industrious lists and plans, run purposefully from one thing to the next, and move fast upstairs and across traffic intersections. We are a picture of efficiency and energy, always on the move, always doing. We’re Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh, always flitting about convinced everyone depends on us to make things happen and to be there when they do. And to generally attend to happenings. But beneath that veneer were being pushed by fear and doubt and a voice that tells us we’re a bad husband, and insufficient sister, we’re wasting time, we’re not producing enough, - that we turn everything into a clusterfuck.”
“I believe with all my heart that just understanding the metapurpose of the anxious struggle helps to make it beautiful. Purposeful, creative, bold, rich, deep things are always beautiful.”
“Every man rushes elsewhere into the future because no man has arrived at himself. - Michel de Montaigne”
“This is the hoary deal-when you have got a mood disorder, few people are heavy enough and patient enough to anchor your ups and downs. And if you're high functioning in your anxiety, there are not many men (or women) out there who will actually take the kite string off you in the first place. And I do wonder if it's grossly unfair to ever expect them to be able to. I've often expected this of my partners. The expectation was too high for both of us, with all of them.”
“Let’s take a look at how modern life goes. Mostly, it’s frenetic and at a pace that’s not conducive to reflective thought./ It’s all too fast for our human dimensions, as David Malouf put it. We don’t have time to adjust, to work out our priorities, and to reflect on whether what we’re doing when we’re running around madly is actually meaningful to us.. While we are meant to have more time (all those time-saving devices were meant to deliver just this, no?), we have less space. We are “on” 24/7. Every gap is filled. Even waiting at bus stops. We don’t leave work and unwind and stare into space for a bit, enjoying the sound of the birds, the soft dusk sunlight on fellow passenger’s faces. Nope, we must prune our social feeds./ Technology freed us up . . .to imprison us further. It’s created the imperative to go faster, to take on more ideas, and to juggle more. There are no excuses for not coming up with an answer, and immediately. Not when there’s Google./ But what if we need more time to know and to feel if it’s the right answer?”
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Book Keywords:
mental-health, love, inner-voice, social-expectations, finding-love, modern-life, inspirational, anxiety, american-culture, mental-illness, self-esteem, worry, expectations
