Sarah Wilson > Quotes

“It can be a good thing, too, to learn to sit in your own weirdness.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“I said earlier that making decisions is a key anxiety trigger, If we drill down a bit we can see that this happens because we work to the belief there's a perfect decision out there to be made. But such a thing doesn't exist. And clutching at something that doesn't exist is enough to send anyone into a drowning panic.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“One of the dear, dear things about getting older, is that it does eventually dawn on you that there is no guidebook. One day it suddenly emerges: No one bloody gets it! None of us knows what we're doing.
Thing is, we all put a lot of effort into looking like we did get the guide, that of course we know how to do this caper called life. We put on a smile rather than tell friends we are desperately lonely. And we make loud, verbose claims at dinner parties to make everyone certain of our certainty. We're funny like that.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“The more anxious we are, the more high-functioning we will make ourselves appear, which just encourages the world to lean on us more.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“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.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“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.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“I yearn for a complete sense of self; I’m not sure it’s something I can find or something I just have to wait for. I want to be authentic. I yearn to find the real me. I feel I am missing a connection with myself. But the thing is I want to find it while “life-ing.” I want to have yearning and be in this life. Everything seems to be fractured, rather than unified as my gut tells me ought to be the case. This stems from a yearning for the world to make sense, to fit together. I yearn for life direction and purpose. My dad’s illness made me question what I REALLY want to be doing with my life as I could inherit the illness and I don’t want to waste time. I want to wake up. I feel like a zombie going through the motions of work and married life and the real me is dormant. I want to know the real me, even if I have no idea what the real me is. To know the connection to a bigger force. To know that the universe has got this one. It burns at me every day to know that everything I’m doing makes sense.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“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.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“Anais Nin writes that anxiety can kill love. “It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”
Ain’t that the truth. I see that look on others’ faces when I’m drowning in one of my spirals. I know that many of the loved ones I’ve turned to, or allowed in to witness me in this state, have had to swim away from me and look after themselves, leaving me to drown. I’ve always feared that they think I’m going to strangle them emotionally with my complexity. So I usually send them on myself.
Sometimes, though, when I put in the work, my anxiety has seen love grow, not die. And so, anxiety can be the very thing that pushes us to become our best person. When worked through, dug through, sat through, anxiety can get us vulnerable and raw and open. And oh so real.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“Many of us with anxiety don’t look like we’ve got a problem because outwardly we function ludicrously well. Or so the merry story goes. Our anxiety sees us make industrious lists and plans, run purposefully from one thing to the next, and move fast upstairs and across traffic intersections. We are a picture of efficiency and energy, always on the move, always doing.
We’re Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh, always flitting about convinced everyone depends on us to make things happen and to be there when they do. And to generally attend to happenings.
But beneath that veneer were being pushed by fear and doubt and a voice that tells us we’re a bad husband, and insufficient sister, we’re wasting time, we’re not producing enough, - that we turn everything into a clusterfuck.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“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.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“Every man rushes elsewhere into the future because no man has arrived at himself. - Michel de Montaigne”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“We rush to escape what makes us anxious, which makes us anxious, and so we rush some more.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“Anxious behaviour is rewarded in our culture. Being high strung, wound up, frenetic and soooo busy has cachet. I ask someone, “How are you?” and even if they’re kicking back in a caravan park in the outback with a beer watching the sunset, their default response is, “Gosh, so busy, out of control, crazy times.” And they wear it as a badge of honour.
This means that many of us deny we have a problem and keep going and going. Indeed, the more anxious we are, the more we have to convince ourselves we don’t have a problem. This is ironic, or paradoxical. And it seems awfully cruel.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“Parisians might drop in for a coffee or an aperitif at cafés where the chairs face outward such that they can watch other flâneurs. They visit gardens and poke their heads into avenues and parks and galleries. Just to absorb and look and reflect. It’s a big part of the French psyche this simple observation of, and reflection upon, humanity. I love the spirit of it—sitting facing out to life. Then wandering among it. Then sitting back again. It’s thoroughly absorbing, which allows calm, paced, discerning thought bubbles to surface.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“Let’s take a look at how modern life goes. Mostly, it’s frenetic and at a pace that’s not conducive to reflective thought./
It’s all too fast for our human dimensions, as David Malouf put it. We don’t have time to adjust, to work out our priorities, and to reflect on whether what we’re doing when we’re running around madly is actually meaningful to us..
While we are meant to have more time (all those time-saving devices were meant to deliver just this, no?), we have less space. We are “on” 24/7. Every gap is filled. Even waiting at bus stops. We don’t leave work and unwind and stare into space for a bit, enjoying the sound of the birds, the soft dusk sunlight on fellow passenger’s faces. Nope, we must prune our social feeds./
Technology freed us up . . .to imprison us further. It’s created the imperative to go faster, to take on more ideas, and to juggle more. There are no excuses for not coming up with an answer, and immediately. Not when there’s Google./
But what if we need more time to know and to feel if it’s the right answer?”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“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.” Or perhaps we could say, a Something Else.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“It’s a gorgeous oddity of our existence – our loneliness is not caused by being on our own. Indeed, loneliness is best cured with aloneness, which is to say, a meaningful connection to ourselves.”
― Sarah Wilson, This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World

“Insomnia isn’t really to do with not being able to sleep; it’s about not having given ourselves a chance to think.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“Alex Korb writes in “The Grateful Brain,” “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.” Literally, you can’t be grateful and anxious at the same time. Once again, the threat system in our amygdala is overridden.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“This is the hoary deal-when you have got a mood disorder, few people are heavy enough and patient enough to anchor your ups and downs. And if you're high functioning in your anxiety, there are not many men (or women) out there who will actually take the kite string off you in the first place. And I do wonder if it's grossly unfair to ever expect them to be able to. I've often expected this of my partners. The expectation was too high for both of us, with all of them.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“In it she wrote, of her depression, “That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“Awe is quite a specific experience. It happens when we view beauty amid vastness, predominantly in nature, triggering a deep sense of belonging. Our smallness against a backdrop of immensity reminds us of our insignificance and interconnectedness, which brings about a profound, yet elated, peace.”
― Sarah Wilson, This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World

“You choose. You might not even know why, but you do. You commit. Then you do the work. Oh, yeah. Then you falter. And fuck up. And go back to the beginning.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“To be anxious wasn’t shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be . . . more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be the person who saw with sharper eyes and felt with more active skin.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“And what about this. When we’re thrust into it, we anxious folk can often deal with the present really rather well. It’s worth remembering this. As real, present-moment disasters occur, we invariably cope, and often better than others. The day after no sleep, I get on with things. At funerals, or when I’ve fallen off my bike, or the time I had to attend to my grandmother when she stopped breathing, or whenever a major work disaster plays out leaving my team in a panic, I’m a picture of calm. Dad used to call me “the tower of strength” in such moments. I also don’t tend to have a lot of bog-standard fear (as opposed to anxiety). In fact, I relish real, present-moment fear and actively seek it out.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“Play with “and.” We can contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said. Play with being spiritual and political, peaceful and outraged, calm and alarmed. This is definitely what our hyperobjectified life is demanding of us.”
― Sarah Wilson, This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World

“I’d journeyed from feeling lonely and fearful to ashamed (of myself) and angry (at everyone else) for not caring enough. But I saw now that the issue was systemic. And that we were, in fact, all in the system together. Which meant I actually had a chance in hell of not shutting down – going acedic – right when the world needs us fully alive. And it allowed me to ask myself, and all of us here, the more beautiful question, “Are we finally ready to do this differently, to imagine, create and become beyond the system that is destroying us?”
― Sarah Wilson, This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World

“According to a 2010 report in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, even getting out into nature for five minutes at a stretch is enough to give your self-esteem a substantial upgrade. And know this: walking near water seemed to have the biggest effect.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“Hiking calms. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a ninety-minute walk through a natural area led to lower levels of brooding and obsessive worry. Brain scans of the subjects found that there was decreased blood flow to the subgenual prefrontal cortex. Increased blood flow to this region of the brain is associated with bad moods. Everything from feeling sad about something, to worrying, to major depression seems to be tied to this brain region. Hiking deactivates it.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery