Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks.

Not one of those big-city thirty-nine-year-olds who deal with their midlife crisis by buying ridiculously expensive cycling shorts and swimming caps because they have a black hole in their soul that devours Instagram pictures, more the sort of thirty-nine-year-old whose daily consumption of cheese and carbohydrates was more likely to be classified medically as a cry for help rather than a diet.

At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.

Older men rarely know what to say to younger men to let them know that they care. It’s so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: ‘I can see you’re hurting.’

‘Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re for ever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.’

It’s hard to explain to a twelve-year-old that when you were little and I walked too fast, you would run to catch up with me and take hold of my hand, and that those were the best moments of my life. Your fingertips in the palm of my hand. Before you knew how many things I’d failed at.

That’s an impossible thing for sons to grasp, and a source of shame for fathers to have to admit: that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.

Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we’re the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes.

Especially if it wasn’t just a fling, but an affair that had been going on for a long time. You haven’t only been cheated on, you’ve also been deceived. It’s possible for someone to be unfaithful to you without really thinking about you at all, but an affair requires planning. Perhaps that’s what hurts most of all, the millions of tiny clues that you didn’t notice. Maybe you’d have been even more crushed if there wasn’t even a good explanation.

If we were infatuated all the time we’d starve to death. And being in love means being infatuated … from time to time. You have to be sensible. The problem is that everything is relative, happiness is based on expectations, and we have the Internet now. A whole world constantly asking us: ‘But is your life as perfect as this? Well? How about now? Is it as perfect as this? If it isn’t, change it!’

If you’re constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind, Jim thought.

An evil little creature that wouldn’t have shown up on any X-rays was living in her chest, rushing through her blood and filling her head with whispers, saying she wasn’t good enough, that she was weak and ugly and would never be anything but broken. You can get it into your head to do some unbelievably stupid things when you run out of tears, when you can’t silence the voices no one else can hear, when you’ve never been in a room where you felt normal. In the end you get exhausted from always tensing the skin around your ribs, never letting your shoulders sink, brushing along walls all your life with white knuckles, always afraid that someone will notice you, because no one’s supposed to do that.

Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it.

She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is. Over time she realized that deep down almost everyone asks themselves the same sort of questions: Am I good? Do I make anyone proud? Am I useful to society? Am I good at my job? Generous and considerate? A decent shag? Does anyone want me to be their friend? Have I been a good parent? Am I a good person?

She had learned to cry almost without tears now, for practical reasons.

If you had to try things out and read things and find out the truth about things, then you’d never have time to have an opinion about anything.

Her son loved her, but she never managed to get him to believe in God, because although you might be able to drum religion into people, you can’t teach faith

‘We can’t change the world, and a lot of the time we can’t even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance, sweetheart. We save those we can. We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that that will just have to … be enough. So we can live with our failures without drowning.’

Nothing is easier for people who never do anything themselves than to criticize someone who actually makes an effort.

‘Boats that stay in the harbour are safe, sweetheart, but that’s not what boats were built for.’

An idiot who is also a romantic is almost unbearable, and that ‘almost’ can drive a woman with headphones mad.

If you can do something for someone in such a way that they think they managed it all on their own, then you’ve done a good job.’

Because her parents had taught her during their flight through the mountains that humour is the soul’s last line of defence, and as long as we’re laughing we’re alive, so bad puns and fart jokes were their way of expressing their defiance against despair.

That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s.

The hardest thing about death is the grammar, the tense, the fact that she won’t be angry when she sees that he’s bought a new sofa without consulting her first. She won’t be anything. She isn’t on her way home. She was.

He never used to talk to her like that, but late in life even computer programmers become poets.

Men and women going around for months having trouble breathing and seeing doctor after doctor because they think there’s something wrong with their lungs. All because it’s so damn difficult to admit that something else is … broken. That it’s an ache in our soul, invisible lead weights in our blood, an indescribable pressure in our chest. Our brains are lying to us, telling us we’re going to die.

They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

It helps to know that you’re not alone when you’ve been left behind. You can’t carry the guilt and the shame and the unbearable silence on your own, and you shouldn’t have to, that’s why Nadia goes to the summer camp each year. To listen a lot, talk a little and laugh as much as possible.