The Normalcy of Pre-Therapy Nervousness
Acknowledging it's So Bloody Difficult
The Necessity for Self-Compassion
There is Strength in Seeking Mental Healthcare
Conflicts within ourselves
“Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic.”
― John Rawls
haunting sense of alienation
“The ideal aim . . . is to become reflectively at home in the full complexity of the multi-dimensional conceptual system in terms of which we suffer, think, and act. I say ‘reflectively’, because there is a sense in which, by the sheer fact of leading an unexamined, but conventionally satisfying life, we are at home in this complexity. It is not until we have eaten the apple with which the serpent philosopher tempts us that we begin to stumble on the familiar and feel that haunting sense of alienation which is treasured by each new generation as its unique possession. This alienation, this gap between oneself and one’s world, can only be resolved by eating the apple to the core; for after the first bite, there is no return to innocence. There are many anodynes, but only one cure.”
- Wilfred Sellars
Even the most famous... have rough weeks
Any Creativity At All
“Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.” - Rollo May
Trample It
My Melancholy
Feeling Anything
- Author Unknown
A Broken Anxious Mess
* Author Unknown
The Frequent Mismatch
“One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people [think they] can do. When what they must do exceeds [their perception of] their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of [their perception of] their capabilities, the result is boredom. But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow.”
― Daniel H. Pink
The Irony
"We need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality and the power that sustains its organization were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest of confessions from a shadow. The irony of this deployment is in having us believe that our 'liberation' is in the balance."
― Michel Foucault
A Very American Illness
"It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out."
― David Foster Wallace
Ikigai
I Take Fright
“When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it—memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis—the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?”
— Pascal
Sonder
Sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
— John Koenig, from his 2012 Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows