After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.
I never want a girl to lose all hope that her life can’t completely turn around, even if she feels that she is at the edge, standing on one foot, and ready to say goodbye.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. 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.
Life is like a game of chess.
To win you have to make a move.
Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHT
and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are
acculated along the way.
We become each and every piece within the game called life!
While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.
Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.
But I love you and I want you and I need you. Can’t you see that? This world has nothing to offer me if it doesn’t include you.
Relax; the world's not watching that closely. It's too busy contemplating itself in the mirror.
Our stresses, anxieties, pains, and problems arise because we do not see the world, others, or even ourselves as worthy of love. (9)
I'd developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all. It was another thing that made me seem like a dick - my stomach could be all oiled eels, and you would get nothing from my face and less from my words. It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all.
Learning to sit with ambiguity can be a very important start at a life liberated from anxiety - and the way to do it is to resist the urge to chase answers to questions that may actually be unanswerable.
Sloth may disguise itself as "conscientious work" and meet with various forms of public approval or success. But work that is not motivated by love for the life of the community, beyond the temporal and spatial confines of one's own small life, cannot free either worker or community from profound anxiety.
In our circle, stress was a valuable status marker: I stress, therefore I am.
For years, I worked seven-day weeks, through birthdays and most public holidays, Christmases and New Year’s Eves included. I worked mornings and afternoons, resuming work after dinner. I remember feeling as if life were a protracted exercise in pulling myself out of a well by a rope, and that rope was work.
She felt happy these days, yet there was always an undercurrent of sadness just below the surface
Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far.
Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it's often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.
But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window-maybe rearrange all the furniture.
Do not let your difficulties fill you with anxiety, after all it is only in the darkest nights that stars shine more brightly.
I could watch him do this until morning - never asking questions and never interrupting his work. I worship quietly - his intense focus and attention to detail and then, out of no where, I realize the inconvenient, inappropriate truth: ‘I love this man… and it has swallowed me.
This is one of the many paradoxes of happiness: we seek to control our lives, but the unfamiliar and the unexpected are important sources of happiness.
Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern man is living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German saying puts it: 'Better an end with terror than a terror without end.
To hear the phrase "our only hope" always makes one anxious, because it means that if the only hope doesn't work, there is nothing left.
I can do this… I can start over. I can save my own life and I’m never going to be alone as long as I have stars to wish on and people to still love.
For so many years, I couldn’t understand why every time I thought that someone finally loved me, like… for real, they would eventually turn to vapor. Every person whom I’ve ever loved is trapped inside of my chest. I’ve breathed all of them in so deeply that I’ve nearly choked and died on every soul that I’ve ever given myself to.
I want to be the best version of myself for anyone who is going to someday walk into my life and need someone to love them beyond reason.
I look out into the water and up deep into the stars. I beg the sparkling lanterns of light to cure me of myself - my past and the kaleidoscope of mistakes, failures and wrong turns that have stacked unbearable regret upon my shoulders.
Does our purpose on Earth directly link to the people whom we end up meeting? Are our relationships and experiences actually the required dots that connect and then lead us to our ultimate destinies?
I fantasize the night sky to be like a cosmic blue print of my life as I close my eyes and unbutton my heart…. just in case anyone up there is listening.
Something, somewhere, knows what’s best for me and promises to keep sending me people and experiences to light my way as long as I live in gratitude and keep paying attention to the signs.
I’ve grown up defined by this desperate, undeniable, ‘can’t breathe’ kind of space inside of myself and I’m afraid that the diagnosis is fatal.
I met a boy whose eyes showed me that the past, present and future were all the same thing.
Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be.
I’ve always seen this in you, ever since you were a little girl - this hunger to love other people into their highest selves and it’s what has made me irreversibly and just so forever in love with you.
Stop trying to be less of who you are. Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back.
I feel a resurgence of my 6-year-old self… that little warrior, goddess of a girl reminding me of who I was when I was little, before the world got its hands on me.
I’m going to follow this invisible red thread until I find myself again… until I finally figure out… who I’m meant to be.
I know that this process of ‘me changing my life’ doesn’t just end once I set fire to this list of things I hate about myself. Tonight isn’t as much of a new beginning as it is a violent end and I know the real work hasn’t even started yet.
Everything hurts right now and nothing is helping because as the pain is getting worse - so is the love.
I just want your voice aimed at me again. I want to absorb the direction of your eyes…
I love him in ways that I can’t explain to other people. They don’t understand… it’s not their fault.
I really believe that there is an invisible red thread tied between him and me, and that it has stretched and tangled for years - across oceans and lifetimes. I know that it won’t break because our souls are tied.
I want you to trust yourself, baby. Love is all that matters and you’ve always known that. You’ve known, since you were a very little girl, what your life is meant to be about…
I know that your soul is on life support and that you feel lost and like you’re completely spinning out of control, but you’re finding yourself - here, tonight… even in this darkness.
Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back. I’m going to help you forgive the things that you won’t let yourself forget.
Each time that I have felt like I might finally be figuring some things out, life has decided to change the rules and I’ve had to start all over again.
We live in the hope that life will be different. Just a little more substance perhaps in the intrinsic frailty of the days. Such resignation frightens me. Between gunshots I get drunk. In secret, all knowledge becomes anxiety.
Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law.
You are not stress...you are experiencing stress. You are not anxiety...you are experiencing anxiety. You are not fear...you are experiencing fear. You can recognize the fact that you are not your emotions and simply accept the experience of that emotion and move right through it.
He looked at me, that first day, like he had just found something he’d lost a thousand years ago.
That last time you kissed me my heart slid past your teeth down into the center of your chest… trapping us both in a stainless cage.
I kept waiting for the part where I’d finally know who I was - some flashing, neon moment of relief, but it never came.
In the old days, when travelers would get lost, they would follow the stars and I love that idea. I wish that I could rely on something as simple and magnificent as a star for all of my aching questions.
I ruin everything. I think that a bullet must have passed through my heart when I was very young, causing me to bleed out slowly, over things and people and every white surface that I’d ever come across.
I want to understand the strings that are tied between me and certain other people and if they really can stretch through infinite time and space without ever breaking. Are soul mates real, and is my life ever going to make sense?
I don’t ever want to hurt anyone, but I really wish there was something like a reset button on my life.
I wish on one of the stars for divine orchestration and save the rest of them for all of the other girls in the world who will feel like I do tonight.
It feels like the world is folding up around me, like origami paper, and I’m trapped inside of its breathless center.
He could pour himself into my little paper cup heart and my emptiness would finally have a meaning.
Standing naked on the beach with all of my secrets between my legs, I look out into the water and up deep into the stars. I beg the sparkling lanterns of light to cure me of myself…
It’s OKAY to be scared. Being scared means you’re about to do something really, really brave.
I think this is what we all want to hear: that we are not alone in hitting the bottom, and that it is possible to come out of that place courageous, beautiful, and strong.
There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.
No amount of regret can change the past. No amount of anxiety can change the future.
God is able to give you the power to endure that which cannot be changed... Why be anxious? Come what may, God is able.
Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don’t have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You’re trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.
I feels sorrier for him than anybody I knows. I expect he done read more books than any white man in this town. He done read more books and he done worried about more things. He full of books and worrying. He done lost God and turned his back on religion. His troubles come down just to that.
How hard it is to now believe that these strong, merciless chains of fear and hopelessness, rendering the limbs of my mind motionless, were once innocuous mere threads.”
-Mehul.M
I wasn’t sure what was going on or what time it was or where I was or even, for that matter, who I was ... but my gut told me something was terribly wrong.
Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer-both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.
Behind every flinch is a fear or an anxiety - sometimes rational, sometimes not. Without the fear, there is no flinch. But wiping out the fear isn't what's important - facing it is.
When you notice yourself desperately trying to think of an excuse to avoid a new experience out of FEAR, ANXIETY or INSECURITY, make the decision to say: "sure, I'll do it" , and see how your life improves.
Of all the heartache I will ever know, only some of it will be real. The rest, I will create.
If I can trust the word of a friend, why do I question the word of the God of the universe? Go figure. Sin is truly bizarre." [Running Scared, p. 111]
When you wake up to kingdom realities, you find that you are tracing the steps of both the Israelites and Jesus himself into the wilderness. . . . The wilderness is the place where God meets his people, Satan attacks, and kingdom allegiances are revealed. [Ed Welch, Running Scared, 118]
The contrast between earthly and spiritual is not a contrast between the tangible and the intangible; it is between the transitory and the eternal. Earthly is temporary, spiritual is everlasting. [Ed Welch, Running Scared, 127]
No power on earth, if it labours beneath the burden of fear, can possibly be strong enough to survive.
I finally understand that it’s okay to be a little afraid of things but that obsessing over them does not mean you have any more control over what you fear.
The Cause that caused a Fear need not appear again. There for not fear about Fear.
You always were such a worrier. It was as if you thought your worrying was all that held the world together, and if you stopped for a split second the whole thing would just fly apart.
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