[quittingfiction]

Recollections of My Nonexistence (by Rebecca Solnit)

Read from January 5 to 21

Looking Glass House

Chapter 1

To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once. (15/209)

“Part of what keeps you sitting in that chair in that room enduring harassment or abuse from a man in power is that, as a woman, you have rarely seen another end for yourself. In the novels you’ve read, in the films you’ve seen, in the stories you’ve been told since birth, the women so frequently meet disastrous ends.” (16/209)

Chapter 4

You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally. (23/209)

As I get older now, even people in their twenties seem like children to me, not in ignorance, but in a kind of newness, a quality of discovering many things for the first time, and of having most of their life ahead of them, and most of all of being engaged in the heroic task of becoming. (25/209)

Sometimes now I envy those people who are at the beginning of the long road of the lives they’ll make, who still have so many decisions ahead as the road forks and forks again. Imagining their trajectories, I picture a real road, branching and branching, and I can feel it, shadowy, forested, full of the anxiety and the excitement of choosing, of starting off without quite knowing where you will end up. (25/209)

Foghorn and Gospel

Chapter 2

Change is the measure of time, and I discovered that in order to see change you had to be slower than it, and that by living in one place for a quarter century, it became visible to me. (37/209)

Chapter 3

I eyed things and was spurred and pricked and bothered by the promise things make, that this pair of boots or that shirt will make you who you need or want to be, that what is incomplete in you is a hole that can be stuffed with stuff, that the things you have are eclipsed by the things you want, that wanting can be cured by having, beyond having what is essential. (40/209)

I always wanted something more, something else, and if I got it I wanted the next thing, and there was always something to want. Craving gnawed at me. I wanted things so badly, with a desire that was so sharp it gouged me, and the process of wanting often took up far more time and imaginative space than the actual person, place, or thing, or the imaginary thing possessed more power than the real one. And then once I had something the craving died down—it was the craving that was so alive—and then that craving appeared again, gaping and reaching after the next thing. (40/209)

Life During Wartime

Chapter 1

A forest of stories rather than trees and the writing a charting of some paths through it. (49/209)

Chapter 2

Even if you weren’t killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence. (50/209)

Think about that for a moment—being raped is four times more psychologically disturbing than going off to a war and being shot at and blown up. And because there are currently no enduring cultural narratives that allow women to look upon their survival as somehow heroic or honorable, the potential for enduring damage is even greater.” (51/209)

Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it’s described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddenly fell into the water, but what if you’re swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight? (51/209)

It was a kind of collective gaslighting. To live in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war—I am tempted to say that it made me crazy, but women are so often accused of being crazy, as a way of undermining their capacity to bear witness and the reality of what they testify to. Besides, in these cases, crazy is often a euphemism for unbearable suffering. So it didn’t make me crazy; it made me unbearably anxious, preoccupied, indignant, and exhausted. (54/209)

But it wasn’t weather; it wasn’t nature; it wasn’t inevitable and immutable. It was culture, it was particular people and a system that gave them latitude, looked the other way, eroticized, excused, ignored, dismissed, and trivialized. Changing that culture and those conditions seemed to be the only adequate response. It still does. It could have been me who found herself in a moment in which my fate was not my own, my body was not my own, my life was not my own, and I hovered on that brink and was haunted by it for a few years that reshaped my psyche in ways that will never be over. Which was, perhaps, the point: to remind me that I would never be entirely free. (55/209)

Chapter 3

We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak. In my case, it wasn’t a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don’t remember how it happened. It never occurred to me to speak to the men who pressured me then, because it didn’t occur to me that I had the authority to assert myself thus or that they had any obligation or inclination to respect my assertions, or that my words would do anything but make things worse. (57/209)

When no one else seems to trust you, it’s hard to trust yourself, and if you do, you pit yourself against them all; either of those options can make you feel crazy and get called crazy. Not everyone has the backbone for it. When your body is not your own and the truth is not your own, what is? (60/209)

Chapter 4

What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you? (65/209)

Disappearing Acts

Chapter 2

Where do you stand? Where do you belong? Those are often questions about political stances or values, but sometimes the question is personal: Do you feel like you have ground to stand on? Is your existence justified in your own eyes, enough that you don’t have to retreat or attack? Do you have a right to be there, to participate, to take up space in the world, the room, the conversation, the historical record, the decision-making bodies, to have needs, wants, rights? Do you feel obliged to justify or apologize or excuse yourself to others? Do you fear the ground being pulled out from under you, the door slammed in your face? Do you not stake a claim to begin with, because you’ve already been defeated or expect to be if you show up? Can you state what you want or need without its being regarded, by yourself or those you address, as aggression or imposition? (70/209)

One of the struggles I was engaged in when I was young was about whether the territory of my own body was under my jurisdiction or somebody else’s, anybody else’s, everybody else’s, whether I controlled its borders, whether it would be subject to hostile invasions, whether I was in charge of myself. (71/209)

Conversations are another territory where questions arise about who may take up space, who is interrupted or harassed into silence, that condition of occupying no verbal space. (72/209)

Chapter 3

Sometimes having a body seemed to be the problem, having a body that exposed me to danger and potential harm and also to shame and shortcomings and the problems of how to connect and how to fit in, whatever that meant, whatever feeling I imagined people who were confident about their bodies and their movements and their memberships felt. (73/209)

Perhaps it’s that a woman exists in a perpetual state of wrongness, and the only way to triumph is to refuse the terms by which this is so. (73/209)

I was hungry for stories, books, music, for power, and for a life that was truly mine, hungry to become, to make myself, to distance myself as far as possible from where I was in my teens, to keep going until I arrived someplace that felt better. (77/209)

Later in my twenties, an older man I was seeing said, “Baby, you’re driven,” and in that age when I threw out sharp replies without thinking, I said all too accurately, “And you’re parked.” I was driven, to redeem my existence by achievement, to keep going until I reached a better place (and when I did, the habit was too ingrained for me to slow down), to make something, to stop being what I was and become something else, to meet all the demands placed on me, and of course to meet everyone else’s needs first or instead. There was real joy in the creative and intellectual life, but also a withdrawal from all the other realms of life. I was like an army that had retreated to its last citadel, which in my case was my mind. (77-78/209)

We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak, or we say disappeared, which presumes that the person, place, or thing first appeared. But there are so many things that were never murmured, never showed up, were not allowed to enter rather than forced to exit. And there are people who showed up and spoke up who were not seen or heard; they were not silent, not invisible, but their testimony fell on deaf ears, their presence was not noted. (79/209)

Women were allegorical figures—liberty and justice—but not actual people. A landscape full of places named after women and statues of women might have encouraged me and other girls in profound ways. The names of women were absent, and these absences were absent from our imaginations. It was no wonder we were supposed to be so slender as to shade into nonexistence. (80/209)

Freely at Night

Chapter 1

He is an expert on the night, on night as the mysteries of the human heart and the fluidity of who we are and the foolishness of who we think we are and what we think we should have and hold. (89/209)

Chapter 2

The sheer pleasure of meeting new voices and ideas and possibilities, having the world become more coherent in some subtle or enormous way, extending or filling in your map of the universe, is not nearly celebrated enough, nor is the beauty in finding pattern and meaning. But these awakenings recur, and every time they do there’s joy. (92-93/209)

Chapter 3

“To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage with such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continuously accompanied by her own image of herself. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.” (98/209)

You learn to think of what you are in terms of what they want, and addressing their want becomes so ingrained in you that you lose sight of what you want, and sometimes you vanish to yourself in the art of appearing to and for others. (98-99/209)

I would not call books an escape if that meant that I was only hiding out in them for fear of something else. They were glorious places to be, and they set my mind on fire and brought me in contact with the authors themselves... (101/209)

There was nonexistence in living through books as well as many other existences and minds and dreams to inhabit and ways of expanding one’s own imaginative and imaginary existence. (101/209)

Some Uses of Edges

Chapter 1

Art could be almost anything, which meant that every premise was open to question, every problem to exploration, every situation to intervention, and I came to understand visual art as a kind of philosophical inquiry by other means. (115/209)

Chapter 2

... the mountain is beautiful in the distance and steep when you’re on it. Becoming a writer formalizes something essential about becoming a human: the task of figuring out what stories to tell and how to tell them and who you are in relation to them, which you choose or which choose you, and what the people around you desire and how much to listen to them and how much to listen to other things, deeper in and farther away. But also, you have to write. (124/209)

... her distress to me at no longer being in the center of things, with the implication that centers are what matters. I went home and thought about the value of margins. I’d written about them in my work on hope and social change, because I’d been following how ideas move from the shadows and the fringes into the center and how much the center likes to forget or ignore those origins—or just how those in the floodlights can’t see what’s in the shadows. (126/209)

They had that camaraderie I still sometimes recognize in small towns and conservative communities, where the outsiders stick together because their differences from each other are insignificant in the face of their differences from a hostile mainstream. (129/209)

Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together—or tearing some piece of it apart to find what’s hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions—and in this sense creation and destruction can be akin. (130/209)

Collage makes something new without hiding the traces of the old, makes a new whole out of scraps without erasing the scrappiness, emerges from an idea of creation not as making something out of nothing. (131/209)

Diving Into the Wreck

Chapter 2

It is not always possible to say that a given weather event is due to climate change, but that climate change shapes the trends is clear, and the same can be said of discrimination—that this particular event may or may not be due to someone’s attitudes about people in your category, but the cumulative effect suggests a pattern. (144/209)

Not everyone makes it through, and what tries to kill you takes a lot of your energy that might be better used elsewhere and makes you tired and anxious. (149/209)

Chapter 3

... who you are and what you do and make and wear and say can be a contribution to people around you, that many of the most valuable gifts are not direct or material or measurable. That even how you live your life can be a gift to others. (151-152/209)

The gay men and lesbians around me encouraged me to imagine that gender is whatever you want it to be, and that the rules were breakable, and that the price to pay for breaking them was generally worth it and then some. The men made it clear that what troubled and frustrated me in straight men was not innate to the gender but built into the role. ... They modeled for me the radical beauty of refusing your assignment, and if they did not have to be what they were supposed to be, then neither did I. (153/209)

It’s a version of love that’s war, the enactment or realization of a set of metaphors in which men’s bodies are weapons and women’s bodies are targets, and queer bodies are hated for blurring the distinction or rejecting the metaphors. (157/209)

Everyone is interdependent. Everyone is vulnerable. Everyone is penetrable, and everyone is penetrated incessantly by the vibrations of sound traveling into the inner ear, by the light shining in our eyes and on the surface of our bodies, by the air we must never stop breathing, by the food and water we take in, by the contacts that generate sensations that run from the surface of our skin to our brains, by the pheromones and bacteria we transmit imperceptibly to each other by air and contact, by the smells that are tiny particles we have inhaled, by the myriad species of beneficial bacteria in our gut and elsewhere that constitute so vast a portion of a human body that self is something of a misnomer or at least a crowd and maybe a party. If you were truly impenetrable you’d be dead in minutes, and there was a kind of deadening inertness that was part of the equation of imagining you could be so. (157-158/209)

Audibility, Credibility, Consequence

Chapter 1

Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a life must also be. We collage ourselves into being, finding the pieces of a worldview and people to love and reasons to live and then integrate them into a whole, a life consistent with its beliefs and desires, at least if we’re lucky. (162/209)

... access to nature is also contingent on your sense of safety ... (163/209)

Chapter 2

The present becomes the past through increments too small to measure; suddenly something that is becomes something that was, and the way we live is not the way we lived. (173/209)

(which always raises the question of what else we do not yet see, and for what failings future eras will rebuke us). (173/209)

Despair became a machine that would grind up anything you fed it. (179/209)

... what I’d wanted to offer is encouragement, a word that, though it carries the stigma of niceness, literally means to instill courage. Encouragement not to make people feel good, but to make them feel powerful. I’d eventually realize that what I was doing could equally be characterized as stealing away the best excuse for doing nothing: that you have no power and nothing you do matters. (180/209)

Chapter 3

“It’s not you, it’s patriarchy,” which might be one of feminism’s basic messages. That is, there’s nothing wrong with you; there’s something wrong with the system that bears down on you and tells you you’re useless, incompetent, untrustworthy, worthless, wrong. (183/209)

I have been thrilled and moved by the young women who came up to me to say that something I’ve written helped them locate their power and their value and reject their subjugation. You don’t really know what you do when you write, because it depends on how people read, and there are ways that knowing their appetites and interests can guide you down familiar paths and ways that not knowing can take you to appetites and interests you didn’t know existed and sometimes your readers didn’t either. (187/209)

Chapter 4

... reminder that though we’ve come far, it’s not far enough. (189/209)

... “all flesh is grass.” In humid places everything decays, and much decays back into the soil, and that soil nurtures new life, and perhaps the best thing creative work can do is to compost into the soil so that, unremembered, it becomes the food of a new era, or rather, devoured, digested, the very consciousness of that era. Marble lasts, but soil feeds. (189/209)

Violence against bodies had been made possible on an epic epidemic scale by violence against voices. (191/209)

Too, though the remedies for trauma most often proffered in our privatized society are personal, doing something for and with others, something to change the circumstances under which you were harmed, is often an experience of connection and power that overcomes that sense of isolation and powerlessness central to trauma. (192/209)

... you deal with the worst things by facing them directly. If you run away from them, they chase you; if you ignore them, they catch you unprepared; and it’s in facing them that you find allies and powers and the possibility of winning. (192/209)

Chapter 5

“Credibility is a basic survival tool.” But I was wrong that it’s a tool. You hold a tool in your own hands, and you use it yourself. What it does is up to you. (194/209)

Why tell stories if they will only bring forth a new round of punishment or disparagement? Or if they will be ignored as if they meant nothing? This is how preemptive silencing works. (194/209)

To be a person of consequence is to matter. If you matter, you have rights, and your words serve those rights and give you the power to bear witness, make agreements, set boundaries. If you have consequence, your words possess the authority to determine what does and does not happen to you, the power that underlies the concept of consent as part of equality and self-determination. (195/209)

Changing who has a voice with all its power and attributes doesn’t fix everything, but it changes the rules, notably the rules about what stories will be told and heard and who decides. (197/209)

Afterwords: Lifelines

... sometimes you revisit the past, as I have in this book, to map the distance covered. There is closure and reopening and sometimes something reopens because you can bring something new to it, repair it in a new way, by understanding it a new way. Sometimes the meaning of the beginning of the story has changed as new chapters are added. (201/209)

It’s about the Japanese art of kintsugi, which literally means golden repair. It’s a method of mending broken ceramic vessels with a bond made of powdered gold mixed with lacquer. The result turns the breaks into veins and channels of gold, emphasizing rather than hiding that the vessel has been broken and making it precious in another way than it was before. It’s a way to accept that things will never be what they were but that they can become something else with a different kind of beauty and value. (202/209)

“I am not suggesting that we should seek brokenness as a way of gaining strength, although some cultures do pursue crisis in their rites of passage as a way to strengthen character and open the heart,” she wrote. “Rather, I am proposing that the wounds and harms that arise from falling over the edge into moral suffering can . . . be the means for the ‘golden repair,’ for developing a greater capacity to stand firm in our integrity without being swayed by the wind.” (202-203/209)

William Stafford: “I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.” (203/209)

People aren’t really meant to be anything, because we’re not made; we’re born, with some innate tendencies, and thereafter molded, thwarted, scalded, encouraged by events and encounters. Despite everything suggests the forces that try to stop a person or change her nature and purpose, and who you were meant to be suggests that those forces did not altogether succeed. (203/209)

[quittingfiction]

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts

Soraya Palmer

Read from January 4 to 8

Why do we remember some stories more than others? And what happens to the ones that we forget? (139/248)

... there is something chaotic and scary about knowing that—that as much as you might love someone, they are more or less on their own. (209/248)

[quittingfiction]

The Last Cuentista

Read on January 13

Story generators are ruining everything. I can tell immediately if a book is written by a real person or a lifeless program. And all I want is for stories to feel real. (69/257)

“My job is to keep you safe, so you can have the best life possible.” (69/257)

[quittingfiction]

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

Read from December 29 to 31

Introduction

You and the people you love are just tiny smudges on a much larger canvas. If you stay where you are—focused only on the shape of your own little smudges, this year like last year and the year before—you will never understand more than you do now. But what if you found a way to step back and look, for once, at the entire painting? (2/389)

Part I: Mouth Rushmore

[Harry Anslinger] was discovering he could control the flow of ideas... (18/389)

The main reason given for banning drugs—the reason obsessing the men who launched this war—was that the blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people. (26/389)

[Henry Smith Williams] started to argue that humans didn’t have to be engaged in a brutal Darwinian war of survival after all; instead, we can choose kindness in place of crushing the weak. (41/389)

They wanted to be persuaded. They wanted easy answers to complex fears. It’s tempting to feel superior—to condescend to these people—but I suspect this impulse is there in all of us. The public wanted to be told that these deep, complex problems—race, inequality, geopolitics—came down to a few powders and pills, and if these powders and pills could be wiped from the world, these problems would disappear. (44/389)

It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. ... It’s hard to sit with a complex problem, such as the human urge to get intoxicated, and accept that it will always be with us, and will always cause some problems (as well as some pleasures). It is much more appealing to be told a different message—that it can be ended. That all these problems can be over, if only we listen, and follow. (44-45/389)

They explain that when a popular product is criminalized, it does not disappear. Instead, criminals start to control the supply and sale of the product. They have to get it into the country, transport it to where it’s wanted, and sell it on the street. (54/389)

Part II: Ghosts

... "we need to approach drug addiction not as a criminal justice situation but more as a public health situation.” (82/389)

It’s not like you are framing them—they are, in fact, breaking the law. You keep targeting the weak. And you try not to see the wider picture. (94/389)

Part III: Angels

Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded. (126/389)

The wealth that came from controlling the market in criminalized drugs bought more than fancy fur coats for Carolyn. It bought him a place above and beyond the law. (137/389)

Part IV: The Temple

" ... There is such a thing as responsible drug use, and it is the norm, not the exception.” (148/389)

... the desire to alter our consciousness is “the fourth drive” in all human minds, alongside the desire to eat, drink, and have sex—and it is “biologically inevitable.” It provides us with moments of release and relief. (149/389)

[The pharmaceutical theory of addiction claims that addiction] is the result of repeated exposure to certain very powerful chemicals. ... Anslinger thought the chemicals hooked you forever so you should be shut away; Smith Williams thought the chemicals hooked you forever so you should be given them by doctors forever. One was cruel and the other compassionate, but they were both sure that chemicals are the cause of the addicts’ wound. The fancy term for this is “the pharmaceutical theory of addiction.” (155/389)

The addicts had been made to feel disgusting and ashamed all their lives—and only the drug took this sense away. “The first time I did heroin,” one woman told him, “it felt like a warm, soft hug.” (158/389)

" ... nothing is addictive in itself. It’s always a combination of a potentially addictive substance or behavior and a susceptible individual. So the question we need to keep asking is—What creates the susceptibility?” (159/389)

These scientists discovered [through the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study] that for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult. ... “Their relative maladjustment,” the study found, “precedes the initiation of drug use.” Indeed, “Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment.” (160/389)

"... I don’t know much about psychology and all that, but I do know that there are things that can happen to you during early childhood which can influence your whole life.” Even Harry Anslinger had noticed the connection with addiction. Addicts, he noted, often “grow up in homes that are not homes, with parents that are not parents, [so] they seek escape. Girl or boy, this is a familiar pattern.” (161/389)

The survivors of childhood trauma are often left with that sense of self-hatred all their lives, Liz saw now, and that is why so many of them turn to the strongest anesthetic they can find. It’s not a spasm of irrationality. It meets a need. It takes away the pain, for a while. (162/389)

“The childhood trauma makes you feel bad about everything. Bad about your family, bad about life,” he said. “And then when you take drugs, they make you feel good about your life, about yourself, about being in the world . . . [People] wonder—why do [addicts] keep doing it? Because it makes them feel good, and the rest of their life doesn’t make them feel good.” (162-163/389)

The babies obviously couldn’t know that a genocide was taking place, but they did know, on some level, that their mothers were distraught and not able to meet their needs. His own mother, he says, “was stressed, depressed. She said the only reason she got out of bed was to look after me. So I saved her life. It’s a hell of a responsibility for a four-month-old, to save his mother’s life . . . She carried tremendous pain . . . tremendous grief, and as an infant, you absorb all that.” So he developed differently from a baby whose mother was able to offer calm and consistent love. Now, as an adult, he found himself unable to control himself at moments of stress. (164/389)

Gabor’s trauma was mild, so his addiction was mild: he can bear to be present in the world most of the time. His patients’ trauma was extreme, so their addiction is extreme: they can bear to be present in the world very little of the time. (164-165/389)

... the core of addiction doesn’t lie in what you swallow or inject—it’s in the pain you feel in your head. Yet we have built a system that thinks we will stop addicts by increasing their pain. “If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted, I’d design exactly the system that we have right now,” Gabor would tell me. “I’d attack people, and ostracize them.” He has seen that “the more you stress people, the more they’re going to use. The more you de-stress people, the less they’re going to use. So to create a system where you ostracize and marginalize and criminalize people, and force them to live in poverty with disease, you are basically guaranteeing they will stay at it.” (166/389)

But what if we replaced this war on addicts with a war on the causes of addiction? (166/389)

Wouldn’t it be better to spend our money on rescuing kids before they become addicts than on jailing them after we have failed? ... But what about once an adult addict has already been created? What can we do for them? (167/389)

“You are an amazing human being . . . You show more resilience and tenacity and strength than any person I know . . . You’re strong. You’re beautiful. Can you tell yourself today you did an amazing job surviving?” (167/389)

The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place. (170-171/389)

It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behavior—it’s the environment. ... addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in. (172/389)

In order to punish addicts, the drug warriors have in fact built the very conditions that will be most likely to produce and deepen addiction. (174/389)

... the gap between the 90 percent who use drugs without its causing a problem and the 10 percent who can’t isn’t set in concrete. It’s the product of social circumstances—and it can change as social circumstances change. (174/389)

Humans seem to have evolved with a deep need to bond, because it was absolutely essential to staying alive. (174/389)

... today’s flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social[ly] or culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for relief. They find temporary relief in addiction . . . because [it] allows them to escape their feelings, to deaden their senses—and to experience an addictive lifestyle as a substitute for a full life.” (175/389)

Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively. One recovering heroin and crack addict on the Downtown Eastside, Dean Wilson, put it to me simply. “Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.” (175/389)

If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin—the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony. The world stops being indifferent to you, and starts being hostile—which is at least proof that you exist, that you aren’t dead already. The heroin helps users deal with the pain of being unable to form normal bonds with other humans. The heroin subculture gives them bonds with other human beings. (176/389)

... “it’s a lot better to be a junkie than to be nothing at all, and that’s the alternative these guys face—being nothing at all." (177/389)

So they steer away from all this evidence and look only at the chemical effects of the drugs themselves. That’s not fake—but it’s only a small part of the picture. There is a powerful political brake on exploring these deeper truths. (179/389)

We all feel [a sense of dislocation in our society]: we have become richer, but less connected to one another. (180/389)

We are increasingly alone, so we are increasingly addicted. “We’re talking about learning to deal with the modern age,” Bruce believes. The modern world has many incredible benefits, but it also brings with it a source of deep stress that is unique: dislocation. “Being atomized and fragmented and all on [your] own—that’s no part of human evolution and it’s no part of the evolution of any society." (180/389)

Human beings only become addicted when they cannot find anything better to live for and when they desperately need to fill the emptiness that threatens to destroy them,” Bruce explained in a lecture in London in 2011. “The need to fill an inner void is not limited to people who become drug addicts, but afflicts the vast majority of people of the late modern era, to a greater or lesser degree.” (180/389)

... we are told—incessantly, all day, every day, by a vast advertising-shopping machine—to invest our hopes and dreams in a very different direction: buying and consuming objects. ... “The whole economy is based around appealing to and heightening every false need and desire, for the purpose of selling products. So people are always trying to find satisfaction and fulfillment in products.” This is a key reason why, he says, “we live in a highly addicted society.” We have separated from one another and turned instead to things for happiness—but things can only ever offer us the thinnest of satisfactions. (180-181/389)

The drug war began when it did because we were afraid of our own addictive impulses, rising all around us because we were so alone. (181/389)

How do we start to rebuild a society where we don’t feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption? (181/389)

We haven’t been able to reduce addiction, it occurs to me, because we have been asking the wrong questions. (181-182/389)

We all know deep down it doesn’t make us happy, to be endlessly working to buy shiny consumer objects we have seen in advertisements. But we keep doing it, day after day. It in fact occupies most of our time on earth. We could slow down. We could work less and buy less. It would prevent the environment—our habitat—from being systematically destroyed. But we don’t do it, because we are isolated in our individual cages. In that environment, the idea of consuming less, in fact, fills us with panic. (182/389)

We will find ourselves on a planet trashed by the manic consumption that is, today, our deepest and most destructive addiction. (182/389)

If solving the craving for the chemical ends 17.7 percent of the addictions in smokers, the other 82.3 percent has to be explained some other way. (183/389)

Addiction is the psychological state of feeling you need the drug to give you the sensation of feeling calmer, or manic, or numbed, or whatever it does for you. My coffee withdrawal pains will have totally passed in two days—but two weeks from now, I might feel the urgent need to get my mind focused again, and I will convince myself I can’t do it without caffeine. That’s not dependence; that’s not a chemical hook; that’s an addiction. This is a crucial difference. (184/389)

As a culture, for one hundred years, we have convinced ourselves that a real but fairly small aspect of addiction—physical dependence—is the whole show. (184/389)

Part V: Peace

“I thought—poetry is something that can never be taken away from you . . . You can only lose it yourself.” (192/389)

... [Bud] was discovering something deep inside himself—the will to live. For the first time in his life, he felt as if he had a home, and a community, and people to fight for. (199/389)

He wrote a poem explaining that “the war on drugs / is a war against hope and compassion and care.” Now that they knew there were addicts at the meetings and that helping them to survive was now an official duty, the city bureaucrats started to talk differently. It’s hard to dismiss somebody’s death as irrelevant if they are looking you in the face. (200/389)

All doctors agree that medically pure heroin, injected using clean needles, does not produce these problems. ... A combination of contaminated drugs and dirty needles had given a home to these infections in the addicts’ flesh... (209-210/389)

Here’s why drug use went into reverse in John Marks’s clinic. Prescription, it turns out, kills the pyramid selling scheme, by stripping out the profit motive. You don’t have to sell smack to get smack. This explains why when you prescribe heroin, fewer people are recruited to use heroin, and why when you prescribe cocaine, fewer people are recruited to use cocaine. As Russell Newcombe tells me this, I can’t help but think of a weird little twist of history. Harry Anslinger always said drug addiction was infectious. It isn’t, in normal circumstances—but the system of prohibition he built makes it so after all. (213/389)

“Whatever gave [you] the idea folk in authority operate according to reason? Your trouble is you’re being rational.” (216/389)

I found that sex workers, if you arm them with condoms and information, are actually “very good public health agents. But you have to trust them. You have to accept their job. So prevention begins with respect.” As a socialist, she had always believed that everyone—no matter how seemingly lost—can be empowered if you do it right. (218/389)

Most addicts here, he says, come with an empty glass inside them; when they take heroin, the glass becomes full, but only for a few hours, and then it drains down to nothing again. The purpose of this program is to gradually build a life for the addict so they can put something else into that empty glass: a social network, a job, some daily pleasures. If you can do that, it will mean that even as the heroin drains, you are not left totally empty. Over time, as your life has more in it, the glass will contain more and more, so it will take less and less heroin to fill it up. And in the end, there may be enough within you that you feel full without any heroin at all. (221/389)

“You are responsible for all of your citizens, and being responsible means protecting them and giving them the means to protect themselves. There is no group that you can abandon.” (224/389)

[Drug-related crimes and overdoses] don’t begin when the drugs are prescribed. They begin when the prescriptions are cut off. (225/389)

... prescription drug crisis doesn’t discredit legalization—it shows the need for it. ... you could expand the criteria for prescription. ... But that’s only the first step: it’s the bandage that stops the hemorrhaging. Then you need to have a deeper strategy—one that stops these wounds from forming in the first place. To do that, you need to change the culture so people find life less unbearable. (226-227/389)

You go to the doctor, you take a painkiller believing it’ll only deal with your slipped disk, after a few months of taking it, you find that your body needs these chemicals in a very real physical sense—and you can’t give them up without going into terrible withdrawal and panic. ... this almost never turns people into addicts ... the answer doesn’t lie in access. It lies in agony. Outbreaks of drug addiction have always taken place, he proved, when there was a sudden rise is isolation and distress. (227-228/389).

The day before alcohol prohibition was introduced, the most popular drink in the United States was beer, but as soon as alcohol was banned, hard liquor soared from 40 percent of all drinks that were sold to 90 percent. People responded to a change in the law by shifting from a milder drink to a stronger drink. This seems puzzling. Why would a change in the law change people’s tastes in alcohol? It turns out it didn’t change their tastes. It changed something else: the range of drinks that were offered to them. ... Most people want to get mildly intoxicated. Relatively few of us want to get totally shit-faced. But if no mild intoxicants are available, plenty of people will use a more extreme intoxicant, because it’s better than nothing. Prohibition always narrows the market to the most potent possible substance. It’s the iron law. ... The harder you crack down, the stronger the drugs become. (230-231/389)

The war on drugs makes it almost impossible for drug users to get milder forms of their drug—and it pushes them inexorably toward harder drugs. After absorbing all this, I realize we have been told a story about the prescription drug crisis that doesn’t graft onto reality. It has been presented to us through the old drug war story—the chemical is to blame, and if only we could eradicate the chemical, we could eradicate the problem. It is a tempting story, because it is so simple—and allows us to avert our eyes from how much of this problem was created not by pills, but by people. (231-232/389)

... they should offer addicts “the possibility of having a new life,” and give them “pleasure” instead of pain. His goal as a doctor was always “trying to identify what happened in the past” of an addict that made them find everyday life unbearable, and to help them overcome it by offering compassion and helping them to build a good life. (238/389)

Choosing to put a chemical into your body should not be a crime, and being addicted should not be a crime. Instead, all the money spent on arresting, trying, and punishing addicts should be transferred to educating kids and helping addicts to recover. (238/389)

... “using drugs is only a symptom of some suffering, and we have to reach the reasons" that make addicts want to be out of their heads much of the time. “You can stop using drugs for a while, but if you don’t solve the problems you have in your mind, things will come back. We have to work [on] the trauma in your life, and only then can you change the way you deal with it.” So this institution is here, as he puts it, to help addicts “to increase their insight, to analyze themselves—helping them to understand themselves [and] the way they react.” their heads much of the time. “You can stop using drugs for a while, but if you don’t solve the problems you have in your mind, things will come back. We have to work [on] the trauma in your life, and only then can you change the way you deal with it.” So this institution is here, as he puts it, to help addicts “to increase their insight, to analyze themselves—helping them to understand themselves [and] the way they react.” Over your year and a half being treated here for addiction, the team will try to build a safe, trusting environment where you can do something you have been running away from for years—express your emotions, and tell your story truthfully. and tell your story truthfully. (241-389)

... drugs aren’t going away, so you need instead to give people the internal tools—the confidence, the knowledge, the support—to make the right decisions for themselves. (248/389)

... it seems, that strengthening people’s internal resistance to drugs works a lot better than trying to terrorize them away from drugs with force. The alternative works. (251/389)

A compassionate approach leads to less addiction. (252/389)

And now their drug policy says that every one of them—even the weakest and sickest of their siblings—deserves not to be beaten down or shut up but to be embraced, and offered hope, and love. In a true democracy, nobody gets written off. Nobody gets abandoned. Nobody’s life is declared to be not worth living. That was the spirit of the revolution. The revolution lives. (255/389)

When you decriminalize, you stop punishing drug users and drug addicts—but you continue to ban the manufacture and selling of the drugs. They are still supplied by criminal drug dealers. When you legalize, you set up a network of stores or pharmacies or prescription where users and addicts can buy their drugs. (263-264/389)

Some of this increase was probably due to the fact that people are more likely to openly admit to smoking cannabis when it is no longer a crime—but it is unlikely that this explains all of the rise. (264/389)

... there are significant numbers of people who want to obey the law because it is the law. If something is illegal, that has a deterrent effect all on its own. Then, on top of that, if you ban something, it does become somewhat harder for most people to get hold of. (266/389)

It is not drug use that worries us, but the harms caused by drug use. And the evidence about these harms is quite striking. Legalization slightly increases drug use—but it significantly reduces drug harms. (266/389)

Because the people who sell alcohol in our culture have a really strong incentive not to sell to teenagers: if they do, they lose their license and their business. The people who sell other, prohibited drugs in our culture have a really strong incentive to sell to teenagers: they are customers like everybody else. If we legalize, there will be a barrier standing between our kids and drugs that does not exist today. (267/389)

Build a third tier of regulation, beyond open sale or prescription. You’d establish safe designated rooms in our big cities, where people would be allowed to buy and use these more hard-core drugs, with doctors on hand, provided they didn’t leave until the drugs had worn off. (269-270/389)

... of the people who have tried crack, just 3 percent have used it in the past month, and at most 20 percent were ever addicted at any point in their lives. (270/389)

... chemical hooks are only a minor part of addiction. The other factors, like isolation and trauma, have been proven to be much bigger indicators. Yet the drug war increases the biggest drivers of addiction—isolation and trauma—in order to protect potential users from a more minor driver of addiction, the chemical hook. If we legalize, somewhat more people will be exposed to the chemical hook in drugs—but the even larger drivers of addiction, trauma and isolation, will be dramatically reduced. (271/389)

... happiness doesn’t come from what you have, but from what you are.” Later, when I speak to him on the telephone, Mujica tells me: “If I have too much luggage, too much property, too many material goods, that makes me worry I have to defend this stuff—then in that case I will not have time left to take care of the things I really love, and then I lose my freedom.” (274/389)

"It’s a conveyor belt of people coming in and out of the system . . . Case called. Sentence entered, paperwork filled out. You go to the bailiff. Next case . . . The drama is afterward, when they go to get a job and they can’t because they have a conviction, when they can’t pay their fines and end up having to spend more time in jail . . . It’s a never-ending spiral of hopelessness.” (278/389)

“Our message addresses that perception of harm head-on, whereas traditional messages have avoided that and simply focused on problems associated with prohibition.” (280/389)

“I’m not asking you to like marijuana or even think it’s a good thing,” she would explain. “In fact, I don’t use marijuana myself, and I would prefer if people didn’t use marijuana. We’re not talking about liking marijuana or advocating its use. We’re talking about a policy that has not benefited society, and has actually caused more harm than good.” (281/389)

Dependence is a risk. Driving accidents are a risk. Teenagers using marijuana early and regularly and becoming derailed . . . is a risk, and to say marijuana is harmless is misinformed, and it’s misinforming those people you’re talking to.” (282/389)

“Street dealers don’t check ID.” Legalization, they said, would restrict access to weed for teens. (282/389)

Now, at the end of the drug war, they were violently intimidating people who wanted to end prohibition. What, I wondered to myself, does this reveal about who really benefits from this war? (284/389)

The fears about legalization began to bleed away once people could see it in practice. (286/389)

“All drugs,” Mason says, “should be treated based on their relative harms. These are different substances—they demand different treatment.” (286/389)

Their case for legalizing marijuana was not that it is safe, but that the drug laws do more harm than the drug itself—and this, they believe, is an argument that can and will be expanded to many other chemicals. (286/389)

He found that one drug was quite far ahead of all the others. It had a harm score of 72. The next most harmful drug was heroin—and it had a harm score of 55, just ahead of crack at 54 and methamphetamine at 32. It wasn’t even close. The most harmful drug was alcohol. This is so radically counterintuitive that it was only after I talked it over with Professor Nutt in detail, and then Professor Carl Hart and others, that I understood it fully. Nutt points out that the other drugs can be very harmful, too—but it is simply a provable fact that they harm few people, and cause them to harm fewer people in turn. He explains that this doesn’t tell you that these drugs are safe—merely that alcohol is considerably more dangerous than we realize. (287/389)

... people will never choose to bring drugs into the legal realm of regulation so long as they believe they are demonic substances that hijack most of their users and destroy them. When they discover that these drugs are in fact less dangerous than alcohol, and addiction is caused mainly by trauma and isolation rather than the drug itself, they will be more receptive to new approaches. They will think about the drugs differently—and that, in turn, will make them change their minds about the cage we put drugs in. (288/389)

You won’t win an argument about the drugs. You can win an argument about the drug war. (288/389)

Conclusion: If You Are Alone

The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection. It’s all I can offer. It’s all that will help him in the end. If you are alone, you cannot escape addiction. If you are loved, you have a chance. (293/389)

If you are brave, if you refuse to be defeated, there will be a ripple effect from your actions that you may never see—but it will be there, transforming lives. (296/389)

If you are alone, you are vulnerable to addiction, and if you are alone, you are vulnerable to the drug war. But if you take the first step and find others who agree with you—if you make a connection—you lose your vulnerability, and you start to win. (287/389)

Afterword: The Opposite of Addiction Is Connection

People are particularly hungry for three things. The first is a message of love and compassion toward people with addictions. The second is a desperate need to end the violence caused by the ongoing decision to criminalize drugs. And the third is evidence about how the alternatives actually work in practice. (72.5%)

Courage, I realized, is contagious. Compassion, too, is contagious. (72.7%)

"There is no one to care, if you do not care. Bud Osborn, 1947–2014.” (72.7%)

I learned that you never know where your allies will be; that love and compassion exist on every part of the political spectrum; and the drug war is so harmful that it can unite people from a very broad range of perspectives. (73.4%)

The whole world owes a massive apology to Colombia for what we have done to you. We forced you to fight a drug war that killed tens of thousands of your countrymen, when we knew it was futile and achieved nothing at all. After I said this in Cartagena, a young woman stood up during the question and answer period and said to me: “Nobody has ever said that to us before. We were always told we were the ones who were to blame, the people in the wrong.” (73.8%)

At one point, she told me that I didn’t understand: she had, she said, been “evil” when she was a heroin user. I told her later that it broke my heart to hear her talk about herself in this way. You may have done bad things when you were addicted, I said—we have all done bad things, by the way, whether we had an addiction or not—but that was because you were in terrible pain, and you deserved love then, and you deserve love now. I also implored her to not communicate the notion that addiction makes you “evil” to the very vulnerable people coming to her for help. (74.0%)

... playing out their own traumas and internal stigma on people too raw and fragile to argue back. (74.3%)

Many people relapse into their addiction months or years after detoxing—long after their body’s hunger for the physical hook has passed from their system. Why? Not because of the drug’s lingering physical effect, which is long gone; it is because they find it unbearable to be present in their lives, because their lives are too painful, and so they are seeking a form of relief and release. (75.3%)

I discovered there is scientific evidence that there are nine different kinds of disconnection that are making us deeply distressed—and that are, in turn, leading many of us to seek out very powerful anesthetics. To name one example: we are the loneliest humans who have ever lived, with fewer friends than any members of our species before us—and it is making us feel dreadful. Across the U.S., there has been a series of collapses—in social connections; in access to the natural world; in the sense that we have a secure future—and many more. If you want to understand why so many people are taking painkillers, you have to understand why so many people are in so much pain—and psychological pain is as real as physical pain. (75.8%)

... as your society becomes more unequal, you are more likely to feel insecure and humiliated, and therefore more likely to become depressed or anxious. (76.6%)

... our brains change as a result of how we live our lives ... because they are using their brains differently, and that physically alters them. Cacioppo says we need to think in terms of “social neuroscience”—your brain is reshaped by social forces. (76.7%)

What I heard at the conference seemed to me to symbolize the basic error I had seen happening, right back to the birth of the drug war—the desire to take something complex, something human, something that requires our compassion and our intellect, and to distill it down to something really simple. (76.7%)

And many of our scientists imagine the root cause of addiction can be found on a brain scan, in a society that is falling apart, where many people have no friends, where they are taught life is all about buying things and showing them off on Instagram, where they are experiencing more and more humiliation as each day passes. (76.9%)

The fantasy that we can find a technical fix to this crisis—a switch in the brain that would end addiction, say—is part of the long story I tracked through this book. What I had been taught is: you can’t find a simple, symbolic solution to a social and spiritual crisis. I know it’s hard to admit the reality of what we are facing. The drug war, and the addiction crisis, are symptoms of a deeply disconnected culture, and we need to begin the long and difficult work of healing that culture. But I know that is possible, because I have seen it happen with my own eyes. (76.9%)

[quittingfiction]

The Vagina Monologues

Eve Ensler

Read from January 1 to 5

I say it because I believe that what we don’t say we don’t see, acknowledge, or remember. What we don’t say becomes a secret, and secrets often create shame and fear and myths. I say it because I want to someday feel comfortable saying it, and not ashamed and guilty. (12/156)

I say “vagina” because I want these bad things to stop. I know they will not stop until we acknowledge that they’re going on, and the only way to make that possible is to enable women to talk without fear of punishment or retribution. (14/156)

Our self-hatred is only the internalized repression and hatred of the patriarchal culture. (40/156)

My revolution is overthrowing the state

Of mind called patriarchy. (104/156)

My revolution is / Connection not consumption /Passion not profit / Orgasm not ownership / My revolution is of the earth and will come from her For her, because of her / It understands that every time we frack or drill / Or burn or violate the layers of her sacredness / We violate the soul of our future (105/156)

We believe that if we listen to women, address the impact of rape culture, and employ an intersectional paradigm, a different consciousness can emerge across the globe. (114-115/156)

V-Day’s work is grounded in four core beliefs. 1. Art has the power to transform thinking and inspire people to act. 2. Lasting social and cultural change is spread by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. 3. Local women know what their communities need and can become unstoppable leaders. 4. We must look at the intersection of class, environmental catastrophe, gender, imperialism, militarism, patriarchy, poverty, racism, and war to fully understand violence against women. (116/156)

[The City of Joy's] philosophy is grounded in the following beliefs, which are central to V-Day’s work: • Each woman is unique and valuable to her society, and has a right to be treated with dignity, respect, love, and compassion. • Women are not broken “victims”; rather they are survivors who have been through unjust gender traumas. • Each woman is capable of activating her own ability to recover, heal, and be an empowered and transformational leader. • Rebirth is possible. (124/156)

Through trauma, cruelty, shame, oppression, violence, rape, and exclusion, the human species has been wounded, and we have been forced to flee our bodies. (135/156)

[THE 10 GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF CITY OF JOY] 1. Tell the truth. 2. Stop waiting to be rescued; take initiative. 3. Know your rights. 4. Raise your voice. 5. Share what you’ve learned. 6. Give what you want the most. 7. Feel and tell the truth about what you’ve been through. 8. Use it to fuel a revolution. 9. Practice kindness. 10. Treat your sister’s life as if it were your own. (141/156)

[quittingfiction]

Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World

by Benjamin Alire Saenz

There is a voice in the universe that holds the truth of all those who walk the earth. I believe that we are born for reasons we do not understand- and it is up to you to discover those reasons. That is your only task. If you are brave enough to sit and listen to the voices of the universe in the silence that lives within you, then you will always know what matters- and you will know too that you matter more to the universe than you will ever know. (103)

I had never felt this alive and I thought that I would never love anyone as much as I loved Dante in this very moment. He was the map of the world and everything that mattered. (126)

The world was a scary place to live in, and it would always be scary-but you could learn to not be afraid. I guess I had to decide what was more real, the scary things or-or Dante. Dante, he was the most real thing in my world. (129)

"…not everyone you love is meant to stay in your life forever. I don't have any regrets. A lot of people live their lives in their mistakes. I'm not one of those people." (139)

Before we left, she told us to always remember the things that matter, and that it was up to us to decide what mattered and what didn't she hugged us both. "And remember that you matter more to the universe than you will ever know." (140)

"And even though I'm not in such a good mood, that doesn't matter very much because a mood is just a mood." (149)

The world is not a safe place for us. There are cartographers who came and made a map of the world as they saw it.

They did not leave a place for us to write our names on that map. But here weare, we're in it, this world that does not want us, a world that will never love us, a world that would choose to destroy us rather than make a space for us to even though there is more than enough room. There is no room for us because it has already been decided that exile is our only choice. I have been reading the definitions for that word because our parents wanted us. And I have thought about this and I know in my heart that our parents brought us to this world for the purest of reasons. But no matter how much they love us, their love will never move the world one inch closer to welcoming us. The world is full of people who are stupid and violent and ugly. I think that there a this such thing as truth in the world we live in, but I sure as hell don't know what it is. And there's a shitload of assholes who think it's okay to hate anybody they want to hate. (152 - 153)

You're the center of my world - and that scares me because I don't want to lose myself in you. (153)

Now my head is cluttered with words and cluttered with love and cluttered with too many thoughts. I wonder if people like me ever get to know what peace is like. (153)

I mean, sometimes I'm thinking something, and I just want to write it down. I want to see what I'm thinking, because maybe if I see what I'm thinking in words, then I can know if what I'm thinking is true or not. (164)

I love you, Dante. And that has changed everything in my life- and that matters. (166)

Every human being - each one of us- is like a country. You can build walls around yourself to protect yourself, to keep others out, never letting anybody see the beauty of the treasures you carry within. Building walls can lead us to a sad and lonely existence. But we can also decide to give people visas and let them in so they can see for themselves all the wealth you have to offer. You can decide to let those who visit you see your pain hand the courage it has taken you to survive. Letting others in-letting them see your country- this is the key to happiness. (175)

If we're lucky. If we're very lucky, the universe will send us the people we need to survive. (189)

She was crying. I mean, that's what she did. Her tears were part of the way she lived in the world. (195)

And I didn't give a shit that I was too young, and I had just turned seventeen and I didn't give a shit of anyone thought I was too young to feel the things I felt. Too young? Tell that to my fucking heart. (197)

[aseaofquotes]

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

[thoughtkick]

“If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives.”

— Lemony Snicket

[quittingfiction]

I just wanted to drop by and say that I'm honored you have my quote on your sidebar. Have a lovely day~

<3

[aseaofquotes]

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

[aseaofquotes]

Amal El-Mohtar/Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

[quittingfiction]

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

Read from October 2 to 28

The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilization was not half as frightening as the simple realization that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us. Now that, she had always thought was terrifying. (5)

Mother was gentle with the dead, less so with the living. But the boy thought one should be even gentler with he iving han wvith the dead because, after all, they were the ones struggling to make sense of this world, weren't they? (75)

... perhaps her home was not where she was born but where she chose to die (131)

You said cows recognize people who have hurt them in the past. Sheep can identify faces as well. But I ask myself, what good does it do them to remember so much when they can't change a thing? (136)

You believe you are a victim of circumstances beyond your control. Today is the day you can change that ... (173)

How pathetic it was to try to relegate death to the periphery of life when death was at the centre of everything. (190)

'Grief is a swallow,' he said. 'One day you wake up and you think it's gone, but it's only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.' (197-198)

'My mother - I used to call her Auntie - she often felt the same way, maybe worse. People always told her to fight depression. But I have a feeling that as soon as we see something as our enemy we make it stronger. Like a boomerang. You hurl it away, it comes back and hits you with equal force. Maybe what you need is to befriend your depression.' 'What a funny thing to say, honey. How am I to do that?' 'Well, think about it: a friend is someone you can walk with in the dark and learn lots of things from. But you also know you are different people - you and your friend. You are not your depression. You are much more than what your mood is today or tomorrow.' (212-213)

How could meditation help you to quieten your mind when you needed to quieten your mind in order to meditate? She lived with an endless commotion inside. (213)

Back in Anatolia, Nalan had seen at close hand how falcons would perch on their captors' shoulders, obediently waiting for the next treat or command. The falconer's whistle, the call that ended freedom. She had also observed how a hood would be put on these noble raptors to make sure they would not panic. Seeing was knowing, and knowing was frightening. Every falconer knew that the less it saw the calmer the bird. But underneath that hood where there were no directions, and the sky and the land melted into a swathe of black linen, though comforted, the falcon would still feel nervous, as if in preparation for a blow that could come at any moment. Years later now, it seemed to Nalan that religion - and power and money and ideology and politics - acted like a hood too. All these superstitions and predictions and beliefs deprived human beings of sight, keeping them under control, but deep within weakening their self-esteem to such a point that they now feared anything, everything. (265-266)

We must do what we can to mend our lives we owe that to ourselves but we need to be careful not to break others while achieving that. (271)

Nalan thought hat one of the endless tragedies of human history was that pessimists were better at surviving than optimists, which meant that, logically speaking, humanity carried the genes of people who did not believe in humanity. (306)

After all, boundaries of the mind mean nothing for women who continue to sing songs of freedom under the moonlight ... (Acknowledgments, 312)

[quittingfiction]

Afterworlds – Scott Westerfeld

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.                —Joan Didion

“There’s no good writing, only good rewriting” …(15)

Hiding from the truth was worse than being lied to. (29)

“Sometimes it’s like I’m only pretending to be an adult.” (236)

What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, “They lived happily ever after,” and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year. (266)

“Okay, I get it.” Darcy took a slow breath. “But will you tell me one day?” “Of course,” Imogen said. “But right now I need you not to know, because you’re part of what’s making me.” “Making you what?” “Just making me me.” (270)

“… he said that ghosts are just stories they tell themselves.” “So are the living.” (316)

“… it’s my auntly duty to learn every detail.” (325)

Maybe that was the price of loving someone: you lost your grasp of where they ended and you began. (388)

“Adulation is like rain. You can only get so wet.” (394)

Maybe that was the point of the truth—you could erase it all you wanted, and it was there to be discovered again. (459)

Maybe the trick was to not panic. In life, as in the bewildering business of writing stories and flinging them out into the world, you could focus on the page in front of you. (580)

Life sucked all right. It sucked hard, because it was random and terrifying and too easily lost. Life was full of death cults and psychopaths, bad timing and bad people. Life was broken, basically, because four assholes with guns could kill an airport full of people, or some microscopic error in your mother’s marrow could take fer from you far too soon. Because you could make one mistake in righteous anger, and lose the person you most loved. But everything that sucked about life also proved that it was priceless, because otherwise all of that wouldn’t hurt so bad. (584)

[quittingfiction]

Turtles All The Way Down – John Green

I would’ve told her that Davis and I never talked much, or even looked at each other, but it didn’t matter, because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe more intimate than eye contact anyway. Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world as you. (9)

I remembered Daisy throwing daddy longlegs at me because she knew I hated them, and I’d scream and run away, flailing my arms but not actually scared, because back them all emotions felt like play, like I was experimenting with feeling rather than stuck with it. True terror isn’t being scored; it’s not having a choice in the matter. (22)

Our destiny is coming into focus. We are about to live the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else’s misfortune. (23)

I have these thoughts that Dr. Karen Singh calls “intrusives,”” but the first time she said it, I heard invasives,” which I like better, because, like invasive weeds, these thoughts seem to arrive at my biosphere from some faraway land, and then they spread out of control. Supposedly everyone has them—you look out from over a bridge or whatever and it occurs to you out of nowhere that you could just jump. And then if you’re most people, you think, Well, that was a weird thought, and move on with your life. But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all the other thoughts until it’s the only one you’re able to have, the thought you’re perpetually either thinking or distracting yourself from. (45)

“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember. It is enough.” —TONI MORRISON (57)

“Sleep tight, ya morons.” —J.D. SALINGER (59)

I was thinking about how part of your self can be in a place while at the same time the most important parts are in a different place, a place that can’t be accessed via your senses. (71)

Him: And the thing is, when you lose someone, you realize you’ll eventually lose everyone. Me: True. And once you know that, you can never forget it. (81)

“One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.” (89)

Your now is not your forever. (93)

“… I guess at some point, you realize that whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can’t actually protect you from getting hurt.” (147)

You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love. (150)

“You might think that now, but you won’t think that forever.” (156)

Him: … All people in relationships ever do is talk about their relationship status. It’s like a Ferris wheel. Me: Huh? Him: When you’re on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the views from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that. (162)

“… A change in personal circumstances, even a positive one, can trigger anxiety. …” (163)

The conversation devolved into her telling me that medication only works if you take it, and that I had to treat my health problem with consistency and care, and me trying to explain that there is something intensely weird and upsetting about the notion that you can only become yourself by ingesting a medication that changes your self. (164-165)

“But you give your thoughts too much power, Aza. Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.” (166)

Every loss is unprecedented. You can’t ever know someone else’s hurt, not really—just like touching someone else’s body isn’t the same as having someone else’s body. (174)

“I am in love with the world.” —MAURICE SENDAK (187)

We always say that we are beneath the stars. We aren’t, of course—there is no up or down, and anyway the stars surround us. But we say we are beneath them, which is nice. So often English glorifies the human—we are who’s, other animals are that’s—but English puts us beneath the stars, at least. (187)

Life is a series of choices between wonders. (188)

My mothers footsteps Were so quiet I barely heard her leave (189)

You must never let the truth get in the way of beauty, Or so e.e. cummings believed. “This is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart,” He wrote of love and longing. That often got him laid I’m sure, Which was the poem’s sole intent. But gravity differs from affection: Only one is constant. (189)

You never think much about weather when it’s good, but once it gets cold enough to see your breath, you can’t ignore it. The weather decides when you think about it, not the other way around. (201)

Being poor doesn’t purify you or whatever the fuck. It just sucks. (216)

“You know Sekou Sundiata, in a poem, he said the most important part of the body ‘ain’t the heart or the lungs or the brain. The biggest, most important part of the body is the part that hurts.’” (224)

Thoughts are just a different kind of bacteria, colonizing you. I thought about the gut-brain information axis. (227)

“You don’t have to be afraid of that thought. Thought is not action.” (235)

‘… They did everything together, except the nasty.’ (236)

“Actually, the problem is that I can’t lose my mind,” I said. “It’s inescapable.” “That is precisely how I feel about my virginity,” Daisy said. (240)

“I think maybe I’m like the White River. Non-navigable.” “But that’s not the point of the story, Holmesy. The point of the story is that they built the city anyway, you know? You work with what you have. They had this shit river, and they managed to build an okay city around it. Not a great city, maybe. But not bad. You’re not the river. You’re the city.” “So, I’m not bad?” “Correct. You’re a solid B-plus. If you can build a B-plus city with C-minus geography, that’s pretty great.” (243)

“Nobody get anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.” (244)

“So he gives this whole presentation about the history of earth and life on it, and then at the end, he asks if there are any questions. An old woman in the back raises her hand, and says, ‘That’s all fine and good, Mr. Scientist, but the truth is, the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant turtle.’ The scientist decides to have a bit of fun with the woman and responds, ‘Well, but it that’s so, what is the giant turtle standing upon?’ And the woman says, ‘It is standing upon the shell of another giant turtle.’ And now the scientist is frustrated, and he says, ‘Well, then what us that turtle standing upon?’ And the old woman says, ‘Sir, you don’t understand. It’s turtles all the way down.’” I laughed. “It’s turtles all the way down.” “It’s turtles all the fucking way down, Holmesy. You’re trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that’s not how it works.” “Because it’s turtles all the way down,” I said again, feeling something akin to a spiritual revelation. … I was thinking that maybe the old lady and the scientist were both right. Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it. (245, 257)

Tried to let myself have the thoughts, because to deny them was to just let them take over. It sort of worked—like everything else. (250)

Dr. Karen Singh liked to say that an unwanted thought was like a car driving past you when you’re standing on the side of the road, and I told myself I didn’t have to get into that car, that my moment of choice was not whether to have the thought, but whether to be carried away by it. (251)

… “You’re everything everything everything,” and I felt like I was. You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you. (257)

Nothing had been fixed, not really. It was like the zoologist said about science: You never really find answers, just new and deeper questions. (267)

“The madness of wealth,” my mother mumbled. “Sometimes you think you’re spending money, but all along the money’s spending you.” She glanced down at her cup of tea, and then back up to me. “But only if you worship it. You serve whatever you worship.” “So, we gotta be careful what we worship,” I said.

“The problem with happy endings,” I said, “is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.” Daisy laughed. “As always, Aza ‘And Then Eventually You Die’ Holmes is here to remind you of how the story really ends, with the extinction of our species.” I laughed. “Well, that is the only real ending, though.” “No, it’s not, Holmesy. You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don’t get to choose what’s in the picture, but you decide on the frame.” (276-277)

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life—it goes on.” And you go on, too, when the current is with you and when it isn’t. (280)

I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing. (281)

There was a kind of relief in having your own smallness laid bare before you, and I realized something Davis must have already known: Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out. (284)

I know a shrink would say, Write it down, how you got here. So you would, and in writing it down you realize, love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift. You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for live, that love is both how you become a person, and why. (285)

There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t. (Ack.)

[quittingfiction]

Circe – Madeline Miller

That is one thing that gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world. (43)

I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as starts once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me. (152)

Death’s Brother is the name that poets give to sleep. For most men those dark hours are a reminder of the stillness that waits at the end of days. (228)

What do children always hope? To make their parents shine with pride. I knew how painful the death of that hope could be. (292)

But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults. (311)

“It is strange to think of a goddess needing friends.” “All creatures that are not mad need them.” (322)

I would say, some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season. (349)

Circe, he says, it will be alright. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cut, soothed whatever stung. His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive. (385)

[quittingfiction]

The Circle – Dave Eggers

“Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right? Some shitty-ass ladder made of shit?” (16)

… she joined a game the Circlers were calling “Ha,” which seemed to involve nothing more than lying down, with legs or arms or both overlapping. Whenever the person next to you said “Ha” you said it, too. (32)

“… Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage. …” (88)

“… sometimes I’m sure that what I say is important. And when I have something significant to add, I definitely feel empowered to do it.” (190)

“Grief doesn’t arrive on schedule, as much as we’d like it to. But I don’t want you to be blaming yourself. …” (466)

It was the not knowing that was the seed of madness, loneliness, suspicion, fear. (470)

“We all know we die. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.” (490)

[quittingfiction]

First, We Make the Beast Beautiful

Now, a strange thing happens when you realize that some gargantuan, all-looming issue you'd been fretting over no longer needs to be fixed. You take a deep, free breath, expand a little, release your grip and get on with better things. (3)

It's the most incredible relief to know that we're all wearing masks... and to see them slip on others. (6)

"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...'" ... When you realize there's no guidebook, an opportunity suddenly presents itself. If no one knows what they're doing, if there's no "right" way to do life, then we can surely choose our own way. Yes? (6)

I can now tell you it was all anxiety. All of it. Just different flavors. (7)

I take off my mask and share my not-knowing. (11)

To be told that we have an illness that is not our "fault" relieves some of the doubt and uncertainty, and absolves us of the guilt we feel that we should be able to cope better. Which in itself turns down the anxiety dial. (22)

I am not my sickness; I have a condition that can wander all lonely and cloudlike into view from time to time. I (the whole me) can choose to sit back and witness the clouds, let them be, let them pass. Pfft. (23)

For some of us, it does get to the point where the bloody clouds take over the sky. There is nothing left but black clouds. It becomes medical. (23)

Take on board all the theories. But given no definitive causes, diagnoses or treatments have been found yet, why not see this as an opportunity? An opportunity to define anxiety as something other than a problem or disorder that has to be fixed as such. ... "Perhaps the problem, sometimes, is the notion that there's a problem." (25)

"... a diagnosis can be a safe place to plant things until you have the wisdom and learning to take you into deeper understanding." (26)

cruel irony #1: The curious nature of anxiety is such that it defies its own diagnosis and treatment. (27)

Anxious behavior is rewarded in our culture. (27)

Many of us deny we have a problem and keep going and going. (27)

Depression is stigmatized, anxiety is sanctified as propping up modern life, which ironically sees depression treated as a legitimate illness, and the anxious left in a cesspool of self-doubt and self-flagellation for not being better at coping with life. And so we buy each other Keep Calm and Carry On mugs as though that's something you can just do. (28)

It's a self-perpetuating pain—we use anxiety to fight our anxiety. (28)

Many of us with anxiety don't look like we've got a problem because outwardly we function ludicrously well. ... We are a picture of efficiency and energy, always on the move, always doing. ... Sure, we look busy, but mostly we're busy avoiding things. (30)

cruel irony #2: The more anxious we are, the more high-functioning we will make ourselves appear, which just encourages the world to lean on us more. (31)

cruel irony #3: The less you sleep, the more anxious you get, the less you sleep... and so on. (32)

Some of us, though, do not learn how to self-settle, or have a reason to unlearn this ability to trust later on down the track. ... We feel unsupported and unsafe and so we must remain hypervigilant. (33)

... this need to reflect quietly (to reacquaint ourselves with ourselves), without the distractions and obligations of our daylight selves, outweighs the benefits of sleep and so we subliminally make the call: think, not sleep. (34)

When I can't sleep now, I remind myself that it might just be about a need to reacquaint my self with my self.  (34)

I was running around with a hot potato with nowhere to drop it off. I got even more anxious when I became aware that no one else seemed to be feeling the same things. (38)

SIT ON A SMALL BENCH WITH YOURSELF (41)

It’s like we’re searching for a Something Else that makes us feel... what? Like we’ve landed, I suppose. And that things are all good on this patch. (44)

Anxiety is a disconnection with this Something Else. (44)

It’s this lack of connection and clarity that leaves us fretting and checking and spinning around in our heads and needing to compensate with irrational, painful behaviors, whether it be OCD, phobias or panic attacks. It’s this sense of missing... something... that leaves us feeling lonely and incomplete and fluttery. Something is not right. We haven’t landed. (45)

I’m really fretting that I’m not able to exist calmly, happily on my own, on my own bench. ... I’m really fretting that something is missing that should be making me feel supported, comforted, and assured that everything’s going to be okay. (45)

You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day. (46)

This is what else life naturals do: 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. And they don’t try to draw on that Zen proverb about how a flower doesn’t try to bloom, it just blooms on its own. And then despair that they’re failing to do the same. They simply grasp the is-ness as a matter of course. (47)

Some might say this move marked the turning of a new leaf. I wouldn’t. They leaves have never stopped turning. (49)

These approaches are rooted in working with what “is” and easing our way into the life we want, gently, kindly. Instead of building a bridge (with happy-clappy language and unicorn emoticons) and getting over it, we make the most of the river we find ourselves in, even if it might be a little dank and overgrown with reeds at times. By doing so we may find happiness, among other different, rich emotions available to us. Happiness is a lovely by-product of the process. Not the (mostly unattainable) end goal. (52-53)

... the search for happiness is making anxiety worse because “the expectation of how happy you should be are so high, you always feel you are falling short.” ... our pursuit of happiness—including the recently fashionable route via mindfulness—is particularly privileged. (53)

Happiness is put forward as a choice, not as a matter of luck. Yet happiness derives from the Middle English word hap, meaning chance or good luck (thus “happenstance” or “perhaps”). We’ve twisted the meaning in recent times such that it’s now something we just have to work hard to get to the bottom of. As though it’s an endpoint that exists. We just have to sift through various options and decisions and choices. But, of course, getting to the bottom of options is anxiety-inducing. ... the more relentlessly we value and pursue happiness, the more likely we are to be depressed, anxious, and lonely. (53-54)

We can’t blame those of us with a highly sensitive amygdala for being anxious. (54)

... even our best attempts to avoid or combat or criticize our anxiety will only make it worse. Instead, self-compassion is the way forward. (55)

They acknowledge that it’s easier for self-flagellators like myself to activate compassion for another than it is to activate it for ourselves and conveniently supply studies that have found showing compassion for others will have the same comfort system activating response in the brain, this dampening the anxiety-riddled threat system. (56)

TALK TO A KID (56)

Tell them they can’t be blamed for feeling as they do, and that they won’t feel this way forever. (57)

WRITE A “NO BLOODY WONDER” LETTER TO YOUR ANXIETY (58)

Yes, yes, I know it feels like it’s too hard. But you deal with this every 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? (58)

“Bad habits... can’t be reversed or eliminated. It’s not how the brain works,” he explained. He drew a line on his notepad with his fountain pen. “This is a habit, a series of thoughts. They clump together to form a neural pathway and the more thoughts you add to this the thicker it gets.” He draws more lines over the top of the first. “You don’t delete a bad habit, you build a new, better one. You feed this new habit, over and over,” he tells me. He draws a new line, this time parallel to the first clump of lines, and thickens it with more and more strokes of his pen. The new thoughts clump, layer by layer, and eventually create a habit that is stronger than the old one. You build habits that trigger the comfort system, instead of the threat system. (59-60)

My new habit was getting the urge, and resisting it calmly. I visualized this in a calm, meditative state of self-hypnosis, the best state for drawing new lines. ... I reproduced the calm of the imagined scenario. I stayed. I stayed. I kept breathing. I was aware of the visceral urge to check. But I stayed. To see what happened. (60)

It wasn’t about changing myself. It was about creating ease and gentleness around who I was, which allowed me to make better choices. (60)

If you don’t use it, you lose it. This is why it is easier to form a new habit than maintain an old one. (61)

MAKE YOUR BED. EVERY DAY. (61)

“It’s easier to do something every day, without exceptions, than to do something ‘most days’... It sets us up for decision overload.” (62)

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 need to berate yourself for this; it will only make you more anxious. No need to think that things should be otherwise and that you’ve got it all wrong somehow. For this, too, will just make you more anxious. ... Do the anxiety. Then leave it there. This is our challenge. (63)

JUST SAY IT: “I’M ANXIOUS” (64)

DO CORE EXERCISES (64)

... the primary motor cortex linked to the axial body muscles (our core) is directly connected to the adrenal glands. (64)

... when you’re an anxious type, mediation is non-negotiable. (65)

You can be crap at meditation and it still works. (66)

It turns the volume down on the thoughts. (66)

You recite a mantra, faintly, in your head, for twenty minutes. That’s it. If your mind wanders, return to the mantra. Don’t worry about your breathing. Or your posture. Or your chakras. Return to the mantra. When thoughts bubble up, that’s cool. Actually, it’s better than cool. Thoughts are like little pockets of stress that your consciousness encounters as it descends into calm. ... thoughts are all part of this process. I’m not fighting myself. (67)

... it’s really the repeated gentle returning to a quietness that counts. It’s this sturdy vigilance, this steering toward stillness, that builds the relaxation response—or calm muscle—in your being. (68)

“It’s not really about what happens during the twenty minutes of meditation. It’s what happens after, out there in real life.” “Right. This changes things. So meditation is like a little forum for airing our grievances, purging the crap. So we can move on.” ... “You’re watering the root so you can enjoy the fruit ... keep watering, get the three stable. And then things will grow from there.” (68)

... the thing about meditation is that you always have it with you. You don’t have to rely on anyone or anything. You site. With yourself. And just meditate. (69)

Working from a low base reduces the expectation. All that matters is that I’m sitting with myself. (70)

STOP AND DROP (71)

... stop your head and drop into your heart. 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. (71)

You only have to hold the feeling for a few seconds to “get it.” Try pausing your thinking for a minute and drawing your focus down into the space just behind your sternum. (72)

ROLL A SPONGE AROUND YOUR SKULL (73)

... absorbing, mopping up the little anxious pockets. (73)

DEEP BELLY BREATHING ALSO WORKS (73)

... deep, controlled breathing communicates to the body that everything is okay, which down regulates the stress response, slowing the heart rate, diverting blood back to the brain and the digestive system and promoting feelings of calm. (73)

Sitting upright or lying down, place your hands on your belly. Slowly breathe in, expanding your belly, to the count of five. Pause. Slowly breathe out to the count of six. Repeat for 10-20 minutes a day. (74)

HAVE A GRATITUDE RITUAL (AS LAME AS IT SOUNDS) (75)

The simple act of reflecting for a few minutes ... (4-15 minutes) on the good stuff in our lives creates a congruency between our goals and their fulfillment. This moment of recognition that things are gelling cooperatively makes you feel synchronicity and oneness with the flow of life. (76)

“Gratitude can have such a powerful impact on your life because it engages your brain in a virtuous cycle. Your brain only has so much power to focus its attention. It cannot easily focus on both positive and negative stimuli.” (76-77)

... the brain loves to fall for the confirmation bias—it looks for things that prove what it already believes to be true. “So once you start seeing things to be grateful for, your brain starts looking for more things to be grateful for.” And thusly we build all kinds of right muscles. (77)

JUST WALK (87)

To do this you have to walk reeeaaallllyy slowly. Which is the point. Because all focus is shifted to the “breathing-and-staying-upright” part of your brain, the anxiety takes a backseat. (88)

... when you activate one network you dampen or disrupt the other ... when you focus on the breath and the earth and the steps as a simple bodily sensation, you dampen the nosy, wandering storyline mechanism. ... walking eases anxiety because it provides the surging stress hormones with an outlet. We were programmed to offload the build-up of stress hormones after the initial stressor was activated. (89)

Studies show any movement, but particularly walking, will ease anxiety when we’re in the middle of a stress hormone surge. Indeed, the studies show that a mere 20–30 minute walk, five times a week, will make people less anxious, as effectively as antidepressants. Even better, the effect is immediate—serotonin, dopamine and endorphins all increase as soon as you start moving. (89)

...I’ll also advise against hardcore exercise if you’re anxious. Gentle and slow stuff is the best. (89)

Hiking gets us into nature...and multiple studies show that folks who live in green spaces have lower rates of mental health issues. It’s been suggested that getting away from city freneticness allows the prefrontal cortex to take a break. Accordingly, stress hormones, heart rate, and other markers back off. (91)

Hiking connects us to ourselves. A University of Michigan study found that because our senses evolved in nature, by getting back to it we connect more honestly with our sensory reactions. Which connects us with our true selves, and enhances a feeling of “oneness.” (91)

... awe-inspiring natural experiences release oxytocins—the hormones that make us feel warm and fuzzy and connected with others. (91)

... even getting out into nature for five minutes at a stretch is enough to give your self-esteem a substantial upgrade. And I know this: walking near water seemed to have the biggest effect. (92)

... a big part of contemporary unease comes from having so much of our life occurring at a speed that our bodies are not aligned with. (93)

HANDWRITE ON A NAPKIN SITTING AT A BAR (95)

It lowers the expectations. The point isn’t what you produce, it’s the writing out. And connecting with what you’re thinking or feeling. (95)

cruel irony #4: We yearn for something even if we don’t know what it looks like or if it actually exists. (98)

“If we crave to touch this Something Else, to know it, to be connected, why do we also flee from it, from out selves, into busy-ness and distraction and, well, all the things that make us anxious?” ... “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.” (100-101)

“A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul that has not discovered its meaning.” (103)

“I suppose that people who live with passion start out with an especially intense desire to complete themselves. We are the only animals who are naturally unfinished. We have to bring ourselves to fulfillment, to integration and to coherence.” (103)

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. (112)

Its because we’re going in the wrong direction. We;re grasping outward for satisfaction, sense of purpose, and for a solution to our unease. When we really need to be going inward, where the comfort lies. Wrong way! Go back! (118)

Every man rushes elsewhere into the future because no man has arrived at himself. -Michel de Montaigne (118)

When you have anxiety, you do learn to give up on all the perfectly Instagrammable notions of how life should be done. You just have to attend to survival sometimes. (120)

cruel irony #5: We rush to escape what makes us anxious, which makes us anxious, and so we rush some more. (121)

Fear is a primal physical response; anxiety is both this fear and the awareness of what it means. (122)

If anxiety surges forward, depression is a clinging to the past. (123)

If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present. (123)

Depressed or anxious, it’s the unknown that we are more petrified of, so we grasp and cling to the certainty of what’s already happened or to the false security of micromanaging in our heads to what comes next. Or both. 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. ... [S]ome researchers in this field, increasingly aware of the fundamental similarities between anxiety and depression, argue that both may be facet of a broader disorder. Other research has indicated that the same neurotransmitters play a role in causing both anxiety and depression. Some of us have depressed anxiety. Others have anxious depression. (123)

Some literature suggested depression is a natural coping mechanism deployed in such cases to stop us from self-combusting from anxiety that’s out of control. (124)

Depression and anxiety at the same time is being sucked into a hole, in the dark, but with all your nightmares chasing you, so you run around and around the bottom of the hole but never get away from anything. I have experienced both...sometimes anxiety can kick me out of depression. But then it’s like a yo-yo experience and I have trouble finding peace in the middle. They’re frenemies with me stuck in the middle. It’s sort of like one side of your brain begging you not to get out of bed with chains, meanwhile the other part of you barks like a military sergeant for not getting out of bed. Anxiety and depression make me feel as though I’m stuck in tar and can’t get out, even though my hear has so many dreams and aspirations. (125)

ASK YOURSELF, “WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?” (126)

“Ask yourself what ‘problem’ you have right now. Worries about the future or the past don’t exist either—they’re just narratives we create in the present. Practice asking yourself “what’s the problem?” often. See if you don’t start to feel the anxious cycle back away. See if those startled birds at sunset don’t begin to settle, softly, gently, at dusk. See if this gentleness is where you want to be. (126)

Real disasters are a cinch 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 seek out risky experiences is about wanting to be reminded of this. (127)

“I noticed the industry is another system that tells you something is wrong with you and is about someone else giving you a ‘fix’ e.g. healing/happiness/peace/enlightenment as an end goal.” (128)

TRY A FLANERIE (133)

flanerie—a wandering walk (133)

I set my aims super low. My aim is simply to look at a few things, see what happens. You know, to enjoy staying close. (122)

HOW TO CHICK IN WITH YOUR INSIDE PEOPLE (134)

Just create the space with your Inside People and the rest will unfurl as it needs to. ... 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” ... let stuff happen. ... it’s also important to listen to what your peeps have to tell you when you ask them how they are. It will probably be heard with a feeling, perhaps an expansiveness, a release. (135)

... anxiety tends to play out on the body (somatically) when we haven’t yet come to understand how and why our anxiety happens. This kind of panic attack happens when our thought trigger the ancient fight-or-flight mechanisms and we succumb to the response, believing something truly fearful is happening. In intellectual anxiety attacks ... we do the fight-or-flight response while simultaneously being able to understand what it’s about. Not that this helps, because our overawareness of how and why anxiety happens and thorough and genuine absorption in this feeds the spiral. (137)

cruel irony #6: The more banal the supposed trigger, the guiltier and more self-indulgent and pathetic we feel, this adding to the anxious spiral. (139)

She works to green versus red flags. A red flag tells her that she’s heading in the wrong direction, that she’s in the wrong mindset and needs to stop and get a grip. I work to black and white versus color. If something appears in my mind’s eye in black and white, it signals I’m being too rigid. (140)

I’m Wile E. Coyote who’s chased Roadrunner over the cliff edge, and I’m frantically treading thin air, trying to grasp at something to hang on to. But there’s nothing there. Just the abyss. And the more I gasp outward, the more frantic I get. And down I go. (142)

“They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel the absence of pain. To escape a mind on fire, where thoughts blaze...to be empty.” The only way he could escape his burning thoughts was to stop living. (144)

cruel irony #7: The anxious tend to seek solitude, yet we simultaneously crave connection. (145)

The very gist of why I jitter is the need to know I belong, I fit. (145)

cruel irony #8: We need easy-going people, but they can be our undoing. ... They can ride with our stuff. ... But they can also tend to flake, and not realize what a big deal their flakiness is for someone whom uncertainty can be their undoing. (145)

cruel irony #9: We cope with strangers better than our own mates when we’re anxious. I think this is because around loved ones we feel so bloody responsible and guilty and hyperaware of our inconsistencies and neurotic needs. It’s exhausting being that apologetic. (145)

cruel irony #10: We may come across as extroverted, but we have society anxiety. (146)

cruel irony #11: We can talk coherently and rationally about our anxiety, even joke about it, yet we freak out on a regular basis. (146)

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. (146-147)

cruel irony #12: We seem doggedly set in our ways, but we have no idea what we want. ... We’re flimsily coping, albeit with a white-knuckled grip. (147)

cruel irony #13: We look strong and controlling. But we actually need others’ help more than most. (147)

cruel irony #14: We’re always thinking about everyone (and everything), but were so damn selfish. (148)

Rumination, then, feels like we’re doing something, at least. Anything is better than the nothingness of not knowing...and, I guess, ultimately, of having to sit quietly with ourselves. The doing, doing distracts us from the dread. (149)

... take charge when we’re not good. (150)

...leave open for a loved one to read...but only once you fully acknowledge that your anxiety is not their problem. (150)

Your patience and calmness will exist in such stark contrast to our funk that well start to feel silly and return to Earth. Our anxiety does pass. ... stay and be stable for us. (151)

My anxiety spiral lifted because a whole heap of firmness happened. A decision was made. There were sturdy details. (153)

... don’t confuse our need to control our environment with a need to control you. (154)

mediation ... it doesn’t work in an anxiety spiral or panic. ... Really, the only aim is to just come in a bit closer. In such frantic, spiraling moments, I find it’s best to come in closer via the body. The body is solid enough, but not too “out there.” It’s close enough. I find my cells take over from there. (155)

GET TOUCHED BY A SHOE ATTENDANT ... the off-beatness of doing something like this helps. No pressure, but don’t hesitate either if you find yourself needing to step very slightly to the left to break a spiral. A little bit of crazy might freshen things up. (155-156)

GET A THAI MASSAGE (156)

[coming closer into the body] a big fluffy makeup brush and stroke my hand or my face act of taking my hair down and then braiding it ... someone else braiding or brushing my hair Wiggling! ... I pretend that I’m physically pulling the anxiety out of my chest, pull it up and shake it out of my fingertips and slam it on the ground. I rock back and forth Counting steps helps me I read things forward and backward. I just imagine that other people don’t even care I wear earplugs to cocoon myself (157-158)

For us anxious folk the [fight-or-flight] switch is particularly sensitive, of course. (158)

[P]anic attacks are a misinterpretation of symptoms. We mistake anxious-like symptoms for actual anxiety, which sees us get anxious about being anxious. Which can blow out into a separate syndrome called anxiety sensitivity, or AS... (159)

ASK YOURSELF, “WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?” (AGAIN) (160)

I absolutely believe it helps to see anxiety as having a metapurpose beyond the arbitrary torture of our little souls. Pain is lessened when there is a point to it. ... “That’s all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.” (164-165)

“He who has a why can endure any how.” (165)

STUDY SOME FRETTERS TO KNOW THYSELF (166)

... the correlation between creative contributions (artistic, political, entrepreneurial) and anxiety is well documented. (166)

“Something is always born of axcess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” (167)

A LITTLE LIST OF KNOW-THYSELF-BETTER READS, BU NO MEANS COMPLETE The Road to Character — David Brooks Your Voice in My Head — Emma Forrest The Noonday Demon — Andrew Solomon The Fry Chronicles — Stephen Fry Monkey Mind — Daniel Smith Reasons to Stay Alive — Matt Haig My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind — Scott Stossel The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath An Unquiet Mind — Kay Redfield Jamison M Train — Patti Smith Book of Longing — Leonard Cohen (168)

Those who experience intense moods are predisposed to building possible worlds, as well as to taking risks and testing boundaries. He explains that in the past, manic depressives pushed humans forward with their deep insight and creative urges; they strengthened the gene pool by who bravely venturing out of the insular communities into uncharted territory. When they returned, they brought new skills that enhanced progress and survival. (169)

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. (170)

... acceptance, rather than transformation, is her endpoint ... (170)

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until...the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships. ... By accepting the storms and complications of her “individual moment” she’s able to find a personal purpose to her life. Her beast becomes beautiful. (170)

It can be a choice to view your individual moments with bemused compassion and intrigue. To find them cute and beautiful. I try to do this. While trying to not lose connection with my humility. (171)

I’d learned that at a biological level, anxiety is a lot like excitement. ... I often choose to interpret anxiety as excitement whenever I can. ... it’s easier to convince yourself to be excited than to bloody well just relax when you’re anxious (177, 179-180)

“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.” (179)

I’ve found that it’s only when you put the brakes on its forceful charge through your system that it leads to things like freak-outs or brain freezes. Let anxiety be and it will be less so. And quite possibly beautiful and exciting, too. (179)

“Why do we all expect to be happy? We all came out of our mothers crying. Pain is what we do. ... Happiness is generally impossible for longer than fifteen minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried. ... Worry is our default position.” (184)

We humans are the only creatures on the planet who can’t sleep even when we need or want to. ... We are the only creatures with the capacity, nay, propensity—to ponder our inevitable deaths. (184-185)

“Choose discomfort over resentment. ... Anxiety is a sign we need to move and change our lives. ... You’ve got to just sit in it, sit in it, sit in it.” ... We can sit with it by talking to it. ... We can feel into the physical discomfort and find it interesting to observe. ... We can acknowledge what we’re doing. ... We can let ourselves be wrong. ... We can waste a bit of time. ... Let the time pass with seemingly nothing productive happening. ... And it might mean coming off medication. ... when we take drugs we don’t just medicate away anxiety, we medicate away our souls. (186-188)

We’d always rather be right than happy (except maybe Jesus). (187)

To sit in anxiety is to stay a little long. A little longer. A little longer. And to see what happens. We experiment with it, curiously. (188)

By nature they [Holocaust survivors] tended to not resist the pain and instead went inward to draw in this “inner life” when things got really bad. And this is precisely what saved them. (189)

Frankl also concluded that the purpose of life is to suffer. Actually, he went further. The purpose of life is to suffer well. By which he meant go down into pain, own it, and not run from it. To sit in it. And in the process find meaning. To be specific, Frankl maintained that finding the meaning of life is our ultimate purpose and suffering brings us to this purpose. (189)

He [David Brooks] proposed that delving produced the deeper happiness because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people. (192)

The pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is a fear of sadness...I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace is with the word “wholeness.” Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is. (192-192)

“Anyone who thinks they can heal without doing the work is missing the point.” (195)

When we’re in anxiety, particularly an anxiety spiral or panic attack, we must focus on coping. Once it’s abated, though, that’s when we have to do the work. We have to ask the questions. Plus, we have to build the resilience and courage and muscle with a whole lot of little right moves to ward off other further fires. ... “You’ve got to get in front of the fire, be prepared.” ... it’s only hard; not impossible. (197)

I’ve found that all I need to do is take the first step—commit, show up. And my path unfurls from there. ... Showing up provides me with enough forward flow to keep things moving. ... The low aim helped me to just show up. ... Simply show up. Start. Things will flow. (198-199)

“Nothing any good isn’t hard.” And yes, going out on your own and doing this kind of work takes time. But nothing any good happens overnight, either. (199)

Its gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. (201)

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 staying to tell your truth. When you do, it provides a glorious space for a love one—or a potential loved one—to step in and be their best person. (203)

GET YOUR GUTS GOOD Quit sugar. Just Eat Real Food (#JERF) . Eat 5-9 servings of vegetables and fruit in a day. Eat yogurt and fermented stuff. Take some supplements. (203-204)

So I phoned him immediately to find out why such banal decisions stall the anxious. He tells me it’s because we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking they’re important decisions. ... “We automatically think if there are lots of options presented that a choice must really matter even if it doesn’t.” (207)

Of course modern life is one big cluttered drugstore shelf. Choice is sold to us as providing freedom. It empowers us, says the consumerist model. to define who we are. Which we know if just the most absurd thing ever. (208)

There’s a reason decisions bring us undone. First: biology. When faced with options, our two decision-making centers—the prehistoric limbic system (which makes impulsive choices) and the neocortex (which can look ahead to the future consequences of such choices)—are having a go-nowhere tug-of-war. If you’re anxious, your neocortex tends to be particularly fired up, so the tug-of-war is much more aggressive. ... the anxious tend to have decreased “neural inhibition,” a process that sees one nerve cell suppress activity in another, which is critical in our ability to sift through choices and make decisions. The worse the anxiety, the less neural inhibition we have. (209)

Anxiety is the awareness of the “impossibility of our possibilities.” (210)

Zerrissenheit: (noun) disunity, separateness, inner conflict; an internal fragmenting or “torn-to-pieces-hood” from toggling so many choices. (210)

Actually, I soon grasped what he meant by rendered choiceless and why this is such a glorious thing when it happens. I only had one choice available. To stay put. To give up fixing and meddling and grasping outward. (212)

“I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” (213)

“Happy successful entrepreneurs ritualize everything in their lives but their creative work.” (214)

... “dropping certainty anchors.” Drop as many as you can to hold you firmly so that you can flap about as creatively—or anxiously—as required ... and creatively productive—if we know we’re not going to fly away. (215)

...decision fatigue. They liken our decision-making abilities to flexing a muscle. With each decision we make, regardless of whether it’s big or small, we fatigue the muscle. (215)

HAVE A MORNING ROUTINE (216)

Having a morning routine is a certainty anchor with really sturdy stakes. (216)

Start off by letting go of the idea that you don’t have time. (217)

FLIP A COIN. GO ON. (221)

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. (221)

Just. Decide. ... “If we’re actually debating the two covers, going back and forth,  then it means both are good options. Right? IF one was really bad, you’d know about it.” (221)

There is never a perfect decision. They become perfect when we make them. (222)

If a decision—about a thing or a person—feels 70 percent right, he just goes with it; 70 percent is enough. (222)

The studies show that when we decide to do something and it turns out badly, it mostly doesn’t haunt us down the track. We humans are master justifiers. 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. ... we might as well just decide. I share all of this mostly, to lessen the potency of one choice over another. If we’re investigated the options enough, it doesn’t matter. Moving up, up and away from the chaos of indecision does. (223)

cruel irony #15: I convince myself that controlling my life and aiming for perfection will cocoon me from anxiety. But it only causes more of the dreaded thing. (225)

“There a river that flows.” Some of us try to dam the river with piles of logs and other obstacles because we think the river should flow differently, by micromanaging our partners or blocking pain or by forcing a dinner that no one wants (they repeatedly cancel but we ignore the signs and keep rescheduling). When we do this, the pressure builds. And builds. The water (flow of life) banks up behind the obstruction, determined to continue its flow because, you know what? It kind of knows where it’s going. It’s ingrained in the groove of the valley, the gaps in the boulders, and it’s bigger than us. Way bigger and way more knowing. Eventually the flow wins out and Boof! our micromanaged pile of logs explodes from the force of the flow. Our stuff goes flying in all directions. It’s devastating. And then,...the river goes back to flowing as it was always going to. Before we came along and got in the way. I round my metaphor assignment off (cringefully) by advising the reader (poor Mrs. Cochrane) to perhaps try using the logs to build a comfortable little raft instead and to sit atop it and let the river carry them languidly down the river. (226)

FOLD FORWARD AND SURRENDER (227)

“The best way to beat a monster is to find a scarier one.” (230)

... recent science ... postulates that psychedelics may be good for sufferers of OCD. The drugs were shown the shut down the default mode of the brain and distrupt the repetitive and control-focused patterns of thought and behavior. “It may be that some brains could benefit from a little less order.” (231)

... these chilled, happy women “tilted” toward activities and commitments that they liked and found meaningful. Amid the chaos. They didn’t wait for the chaos and commitments to get under control. I love this idea. Tilting. It’s when you have so much to do and you could list it all out and try to prioritize. Or you could just in in the everythingness and lean toward stuff as it arises that just feels right. Tilting doesn’t involved holding up the hand and plonking a lump of logs in the flow. Nope. When you tilt, you grab a log that looks about right and jump on. (232-233)

Indian philosopher Guru Dev says the same: “Do the opposite of what you’d normally do.” Why? It injects freshness. The jolt of going against the grain gets you to look at things differently. ... treating it as an experiment. ... When you shake things up there is no such expectation [Perfect Moment Syndrome]. It’s so wrong it’s right. (233)

DO IT T THE WRONG TIME (234)

SLEEP AT THE OTHER END OF THE BED (234)

Picture a bunch of people loudly talking to you about everything you don’t want to hear—that’s how it feels in my head. Thoughts flood and for me paranoia sets in and I try to grasp on to at least one thought I can be rational about. [It’s] like there are a hundred things needing my immediate attention and knowing that I can’t attend to it al at once, including racing thoughts. Anxiety is like having new tabs opening very quickly [on your computer] one after another and not being able to close them or stop new ones from opening—but in your head. ... Anxiety feels like being the passenger of a race car driver while pleading to be let out. I close my eyes and take deep breaths at every endless turn. For me it’s like a boa constrictor around my body, getting tighter and tighter as more thoughts come into my head. Everything, all of life, is crammed into a tube of toothpaste while has a caked-over nozzle. “Like wanting to vomit but not having a mouth.” A very tangled-up spiderweb and all the web is mixed up with lots of emotions and tangled all together. The more I try to untangle these webs I get caught up in another web. (235-236)

... anxiety was “the feeling of having in the middle of my body a ball of wool that quickly winds itself up, its innumerable threads pulling from the surface of my body to itself.“ It’s impossible to know where all the knots start. Yet, we still try to find the original thread, somehow believing that once we find it, this one unifying explanation for everything, we can tug at it and have the ball unravel cleanly. We think the fix is linear like that. That one motivational philosophy or one successful relationship or one perfect job will straighten out the mess. But I put it to you that messy balls of wool don’t work like this. Nope Our filthy-mitted meddling and tugging only tighten the knots more. Instead, the only salve is to gently take the messy ball in both hands and tenderly loosen it, a bit at a time. The ball starts to unfurl and expand. It is still knotted, but not as tightly now. After a while a whole section unfurls. And then another. Then, after much careful tending, one end of the string floats loose. Maybe the rest of the ball fully unfurls. Maybe it doesn’t. But the point is, the whole bloody knotted mess is looser now. There’s more space. If you’re anxious, part of the healing journey is to create space.” ... Space implies gently unfurling. Time speaks to pressure. Most of 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. (237-238)

... book out fifteen minutes either side of every one of her appointments. “I use it to reflect on what just happened,” she says. “It gives me the space to view what I need to do next.” (239)

I didn’t “use” the time. I just sat into the space. And fresh thoughts bubbled up from nothingness. (239)

FIND THE SPACE BETWEEN BREATHS (239)

SMILE WITH YOUR EYES (240)

Gently and softly. Perhaps notice the way it releases the muscles in your jaw and at your brow. ...this simple, brief action [smiling forcefully] stimulated the brain activity associated with positive emotions. (240-241)

If the smile is from a friend, it is equal to the feel-good brain stimulation of 200 chocolate bars; if it comes from a baby it equates to 2,000 bars! (241)

Modern Life does. Mostly, it’s frenetic and at a pace that’s not conducive to reflective thoughts. ... 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. ... We are “on” 24/7. Every gap is filled. ... 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. ... To stay on top of all the ideas and opportunities that Modern Life now affords us we have to keep multiple tabs open in our brains, which sees us toggle back and forth between tasks and commitments and thoughts. And all of it competes. And it clusters. (243-244)

When we had tantrums as kids, Mom would say we were overexcited. “Come on, a little less excitement,” she’d say. (245)

But self-mastery triumphs in this Modern Life of ours. So if we haven’t found happiness or calm or balance amidst it all—if we don’t cope—it’s because we’ve not tried hard enough. Because Modern Life dictates that there’s an answer out there...you just have to try harder to find it and master it. Of course it doesn’t exist. So we are set up to fail. (245)

“We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.” (245)

All of it drives us outward, away from our true selves and from our yearning to know ourselves better. Plus, it drives us away from each other. Lack of community and belongingness is cited ... as the primary driver of anxiety today. (245)

... anxiety is not a disease. It’s not an unhealable disorder. It’s merely a symptom of having got a bit off balance. We don’t fix anxiety. It doesn’t need a fix. It just requires a little bit of rebalancing. (246)

HOW TO TAME YOUR VATA [flighty] I avoid con-con and fans. I back off from coffee when I’m fretty. If you’re asking if it’s bad, it might mean you feel that it quite possibly is. The routine bit is key. I eat heavier foods... I eat oil. I sit still for 5-10 minutes several times a day. O s tell friends I have to leave by 9pm when I’m out at night. I turn off social media on the weekend and after 8pm at night. ... keep my kidneys warm. I walk everywhere I can. I do yoga. I don’t go to The Shops. (249-251)

cruel irony #16: Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and yet it itself the greatest of our miseries. (251)

... al of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone. And to let nothing happen. (251)

I don’t think it’s bad to lean forward ... We’re human. We’re curious and we reach out. It no longer serves us, however, when we do it to run from something. (253)

... it’s a common mistake amongst hose wanting to get mindful with their angst to expect to achieve states of calm through mediation. “This is a form of grasping—s seeking to indulge in pleasant states and to avoid the unpleasant. ... “A wiser orientation would be to appreciate (and investigate) calm states when they do arise and to treat anxious ones with great kindness and respect. The radical encouragement of the practice is to sit with most disagreeable states for as long as they last. Sooner or later, they exhaust themselves of energy.” (253-254)

These [institutional and technological] boundaries created certainty anchors and reduced the number of decisions we had to make. They helped us keep on an even keel. But today there are few such boundaries. (255)

What we’re yet to work out is that we have to create the boundaries ourselves. This is the new barometer of success, wellness and happiness: How well an you create your own ways to shut down the distractions, reduce the toggling, stem the tide of frazzling data, carve out space in your week for reflection and stillness? (255)

BUILD YOUR OWN BOUNDARIES (256)

Check your emails twice a day only. Try the 10am Rule. ... [do] not “react to anything until 10am.” That is, first do the stuff that matters to you, rather than the knee-jerking out of the gates to the demands of others. Live somewhere slow. ..."Nothing makes me feel better—calmer. clearer, happier—than being in one place.” Have a Family Investment Bucket. Leave your phone at home. Get a room of your own. Try a Think Week. ... Focus on personal development. Create your own Sabbath. ... day of rest. Create a mercenary Out-of-Office notification. Don’t be Google. Just write less emails. Own less. (256-259)

Do the journey. Do the work. Do the little right moves. The crop comes. (260)

... anxiety widens personal space—we need more than the standard 8-16 inches that the average person requires to feel comfortable. (261)

Monachopsis: (noun) 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. (264)

I’d run out of places to run to. “You keep moving. But it hasn’t worked for you. The irritation has just followed you. The problem has to be healed and can only be done when it’s in front of you.” (265)

... sitting in discomfort isn’t just about lessening it’s impact through exposure. It can also bring about a very particular joy. (268)

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 our a sigh. (269)

... “distress tolerance” ... entails working ... to remain in anxiety-provoking situations until your fear capacity becomes exhausted. Which it does. The problem is that if you’re anxious, you tend to flee (or fight or freeze) before you give the distress tolerance mechanism time to play out. (271)

You keep it casual, with few expectations, so you don’t have to extend yourself too far. But the point is to actively seek out the discomfort so that you can choose to sit in it and do the experiment. Because you’ve chosen to do it, you’re that but more empowered. Also remember, it’s just an experiment, to see what happens. Nothing more. You’re just going to see what happens. (271)

Sitting in grim is also a defiant two-fingered up your to your anxiety. I think this is great. For an added bonus, the practice simultaneously forces you to stop the grasping and come in close and to connect with where life is. The simplicity, the inevitability, the flow, the truth of life. (272-273)

What we resist persists. What we sit in eventually fades to a manageable and livable volume. (273)

GET WABI-SABI WITH IT (275)

We can practice finding beauty in imperfection. ... ruts are best broken with small moments in whimsy, not seismic changes in behavior. ... Counting men with mustaches ... “Leave the kids’ fingerprints on the wall.” ... Pick some weeds and play with them until you find a nicely discordant arrangement. Stick them in a jam jar. ... cook a “fridge surprise” ... Have a floor picnic in the middle of it all. And then just see what happens. (275)

I can be a good thing, too, to learn to sit in your own weirdness. (276)

I generally find that anxious people spend a lot of the lives trying to have fun doing stuff that other people find enjoyable. ... The point is to recognize that we do this—defer to others’ notions of fun. And that this is probably because we struggle with choice (how do you decide what your preference is amid all the things to do in the world?) And to then try to play around with finding stuff that floats your boat. And, no doubt, to then realize that your stuff could be a little weird or unique. (276)

... focused on acknowledging that I simply don’t like doing a lot f what other people like doing. And over time, I got more and more okay with, and less and less anxious about, this. (277)

MEDITATE IN GRIMNESS (277)

DON’T CHANGE HOTEL ROOMS (278)

What helps me? I tell myself to try one night in the first room, as an experiment, to see what happens. Again, the metapurpose of the “experiment” gives me focus. So, too, does the fact that I have an out-clause (I can always swap tomorrow night). When I wake up the next day having slept, I have the courage to do another night in the same room. (279)

SLEEP WITH YOUR PARTNER (279)

ACTIVELY PRACTICE MISSING OUT (280)

... once we see dying as an option, our minds will focus on finding proof that this is right, ignoring all the evidence that it’s a shockingly bad idea. ... if nothing matter, if I have no attachments, no commitments and nothing left in my life, I could just quietly disappear. I could self-annihilate. Why not? There was nothing to stop me, nothing I was responsible for. This felt light and liberating. Or—and now the feeling gets even lighter—I could choose to exist, anyway. From ground zero, I could opt back in. And I could do it freely, working form a blank slate without all my old stuff—no expectations as to how life “should” be lived, no false and unhealthy ideas about my worth (that I have to achieve to be loved), no attachment to possessions or money. I could be an interloper with no fixed address and just the clothes on my back. I could do life completely differently. (283-284)

Grace goes a little something like this... You descend. ... You go into pain. ... Then you open. ... “it is what it is” ... Next, you release your grip. ... Then something shifts. (287)

Grace doesn’t bring a party 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 to get it, you can’t earn it or deserve it. It just is. Jut as a flower doesn’t try to bloom. It just does. (288)

“Most people don’t come out healed; they come out different.” (288)

... post-traumatic growth ... up to 70 percent of people who went through the anxious ringer report positive psychological growth at the other end. We’re talking about a greater appreciation for life, a richer spiritual life and a connection to something greater than oneself, and a sense of personal strength. You could call it character. ... a certain trauma can shatter our worldviews, beliefs, and identities completely. ... The more we are shaken, the more our former selves and assumptions are blown apart and the fresher the growth. ... this kind of seismic implosion often leads to creativity. The space created by stepping into the “is-ness” of life invites innovation thought and exploration. (288-289)

“The thing about life, sweetheart, is this, when we leap into the unknown, we always land safely. We just do. We freefall for a bit.” She does a zooming thing with her hands. “But then, as we’re falling, we grow angel wings that carry us to our destination.” I can’t quite believe she’s introduced angels without apology, but I nod. “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.” She nods at me to check I’m getting her drift. I am. “But, sweetheart, there’s no such thing as an angels wing shop.” There most certainly isn’t. You have to jump first. And, you see, that’s the other thing about grace. You have to let go first. In our culture, we want guarantees. When we can learn to make leaps without them, then, well, things really do start to look different. (292)

GET OLD (293)

I’ve arrived at an age where accepting this is “just my life” brings peace and, going through the motions of anxiety when it arises, strangely it helps. This too will pass. You fight it still, but it lessens over time. I followed the “rather path.” doing all the “right things” to keep anxiety at bay. But it didn’t work. After 20 years you let go. Having toddlers are good [sic]—they do the opposite. You have to let go and give in or you will be one of those people whose bodies collapse. (294)

... life and its hardships only make sense when you get old enough and you’re able to look back and join the dots. You have to have dots in your experience for the picture to take form. ... But only once you have enough dots. (294)

Jump first. ... If we’re serious about joining life—like really joining it and not sitting at odds with its flow and existing constantly in a state of dis-ease—we gotta have faith. (294-295)

Life is mysterious. Life is uncertain. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Along with taxes, and death, the only certainty in life is that we just don’t know. So we might as well join this inevitability. ... this is ultimate way to live a wholehearted life—to get cool with uncertainty. ... a necessary experience that allows us to “become free in relation to our nothingness.” (295)

“negative capability” ... having an ability to be okay with the uncertainty of life. (295)

What an aim. To sit comfortably in mystery without grasping outward. To sit. To stay. And see what happens. It’s freedom, right? ... it takes patience and sheer years on the planet. ... I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (296)

GO STRAIGHT TO COOL ... I go straight to being the person who is open and cool with not knowing. ... I found strength that is quite defining and satisfying. It meant my vulnerability was about being raw and exposed, but ultimately was something I steered and owned. (296)

... defines anxiety as resisting joining the unknown. (296)

... the journey we all need to do is the experiment with sitting in uncertainty. ... 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. (297)

To see yourself—to see that you are part of a big, magnificent whole—you have to go to the depths. (298)

We get anxious if we feel we’re not connected with our true selves and what matters. Something is not right, something is missing, we don’t understand what life is all about, and this gnaws at us. (299)

We’re unsettled, we grasp and we grasp. (299)

... being in anxiety, by going down to the dark depths, we finally find the connection. (299)

That’s what anxiety does for us. It guides us home. And when we veer or we deviate from the truth, anxiety steps in and forcibly tell us “Wrong Way Go Back.” (299)

We can view anxiety as something to accept and live with. Sure, this is important. But I reckon we can make the beast more beautiful than that. I prefer to say (to quote Shai from one of the forums again) “anxiety is my superpower.” (300)

The journey has to be done on your own. ... if I want to let go, to truly let go and trust life, I first have to let go of the idea that someone else must hold me while I do it. No one else can tell me that life has this one. I have to do this for myself. (304)

... [he] identified ten factors that create resilience, among them having a moral compass or set of beliefs, faith and spirituality, an ability to leave your comfort zone and face your fear, having a sense of meaning in life and having a practice for overcoming challenges. ... it’s anxiety that leads us to these factors. Indeed, I’d say anxiety creates the resilience to thrive in this life. Anxiety is a beautiful thing. (305)

I don’t sit here healed. I sit here simply knowing I’m on a better journey. And this is not enough. This is everything. (305)

I am anxious often.But it’s kept in check if I don’t get anxious about being anxious. And while I’m learning more, understanding more, this is entirely possible. Yep, the journey is what matters most. It’s everything. (307)