Suffering from anxiety is like being followed by a toothless monster: it won’t kill you, but it can take all the joy out of living.
1. “Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.” Jodi Picoult
2. “The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.” Alain de Botton
MORE: The 5 Best Ways You Can Overcome Anxiety
3. “Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.” Kahlil Gibran
4. “That is how I experience life, as apocalypse and cataclysm. Each day brings an increasing inability in myself to make the smallest gesture, even to imagine myself confronting clear, real situations.
The presence of others – always such an unexpected event for the soul – grows daily more painful and distressing. Talking to others makes me shudder. If they show any interest in me, I flee. If they look at me, I tremble.
I am constantly on the defensive. Life and other people bruise me. I can’t look reality in the eye. The sun itself leaves me feeling discouraged and desolate.” Fernando Pessoa
MORE: 6 Things You Should Never Say To Someone With Anxiety Disorder
5. “She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.” David Foster Wallace
6. “He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.” J.K. Rowling
MORE: 7 Reasons Why Being An Empath Is A Gift
7. “How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?” Joseph Conrad
8. “Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all.” William Barrett
MORE: This Is How Carrie Fisher’s Powerful Words Changed People’s Lives
9. “That’s the most important thing for a sickness like ours: a sense of trust. If I put myself in this person’s hands, I’ll be OK. If my condition starts to worsen even the slightest bit – if a screw comes loose – he’ll notice straight away, and with tremendous care and patience he’ll fix it, he’ll tighten the screw again, put all the jumped threads back in place. If we have that sense of trust, our sickness stays away.” Haruki Murakami
MORE: Why Sensitive Men Are The BEST
10. “There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.” Andrew Solomon
Stay strong! Please, share this!
