Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

Because there’s such an unbelievable amount that we’re all supposed to be able to cope with these days.

Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We’re not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else.

We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.

Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish.

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.

It’s so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: “I can see you’re hurting.”

This business with words is tricky when you’re older and all you want to say to someone younger is: “I can see you’re in pain, and that causes me pain.”

“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 forever 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.”

Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure. They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized that we don’t actually know what we’re doing. So the man did what we all do: he pretended he knew.

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.

It’s hard to tell exactly when a person’s substance abuse begins, which is why everyone is lying when they say: “I’ve got it under control.” 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.

Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works.

We don’t have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow.

We’re the only ones who have to pretend. Everyone else can afford stuff and has a handle on other stuff and enough energy to deal with even more stuff.

But we weren’t ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us.

Life doesn’t always turn out the way you expect.

“life can go all sorts of different ways, but it will probably go wrong.”

dads like teaching their sons things, because the moment we can no longer do that is when they stop being our responsibility and we become theirs.

Perhaps you, too, have children, in which case you’ll know that you’re frightened the whole time, frightened of not knowing everything and of not having the energy to do everything and of not coping with everything. In the end we actually get so used to the feeling of failure that every time we don’t disappoint our children it leaves us feeling secretly shocked.

children notice people’s proportions in a different way from adults, possibly because they always see us from below, and that’s our worst angle.

They have access to everything that’s most vulnerable in us. Even so, they forgive us, the whole time, for almost everything.

And that’s the weirdest thing about being someone’s parent. Not just a bank robber parent, but any parent: that you are loved ...

That’s the sort of thing you never really notice until you belong to someone else, the fact that those of us who give children their names are the least willing to use them. We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.

And love can make you do quite a lot of ridiculous things. Getting married, for instance. Having children, playing happy families, and having a happy marriage. Or you might think that, anyway. Not happy, perhaps, but plausible. A plausible marriage. Because how happy can anyone really be, all the time? How could there be time for that? Mostly we’re just trying to get through the day. You’ve probably had days like that as well. But when you get through enough of them, one morning you look over your shoulder and realize that you’re on your own, the person you were married to turned off somewhere along the way. Maybe you uncover a lie. That’s what happened to the bank robber. An infidelity comes to light, and even if no one’s actually been unfaithful to you, you can probably appreciate that it’s enough to knock a person off balance.

How do you explain a divorce to them after that? How do you explain about infidelity? How do you avoid turning them into little cynics? Falling in love is magical, after all, romantic, breathtaking… but falling in love and love are different. Aren’t they? Don’t they have to be? Good grief, no one could cope with being newly infatuated, year after year. When you’re infatuated you can’t think about anything else, you forget about your friends, your work, your lunch. 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!”

The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.

Suddenly you find yourselves living alongside each other, not with each other. One of us can go around for a shocking length of time thinking our marriage is good. Or at least no worse than anyone else’s. Plausible, anyway. Then it turns out that one of us wants more, just getting through the day isn’t enough.

“Love one another until death do us part,” isn’t that what we said? Isn’t that what we promised each other? Or am I remembering wrong? “Or at least until one of us gets bored.” Maybe that was it?

You don’t put your name on the list for public housing when you’re married and have children and a life, because it never occurs to you that you might lose all of it in the course of an afternoon.

The worst thing a divorce does to a person isn’t that it makes all the time you devoted to the relationship feel wasted, but that it steals all the plans you had for the future.

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

“I didn’t say that money was happiness. I said happiness is like money. A made-up value that represents something we can’t weigh or measure.”

“Having a purpose. A goal. A direction. And do you want to know the truth? The truth is that far more people would rather be rich than happy.”

“Don’t do anything silly, now!”

The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”

It just hurts so much at times, being human. Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you’re stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?”

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.

“When you’re drowning you can’t call for help, you can’t wave your arms, you just sink. Your family can be standing on the beach waving cheerfully to you, completely unaware that you’re dying.”

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

Perhaps that’s because what we think stories are about often isn’t what they’re about at all.

They never argue anymore, unless perhaps they argue all the time. When you’ve been stuck with each other long enough it can seem like there’s no difference between no longer arguing and no longer caring.

When you’ve been together for a very long time, it’s the little things that matter. In a long marriage you don’t need words to have a row, but you don’t need words to say “I love you,” either.

Because that’s how he loves her.

Because that’s how she loves him.

People like that go to viewings thinking that everything would feel better if only they were living there. That they’d wake up in the mornings and not find it hard to breathe. They wouldn’t have to look in the bathroom mirror with an invisible weight in their chest. They’d argue less. Maybe touch each other’s hands the way they did when they were first married, back when they couldn’t help it. That’s what they think.

Anna-Lena always seemed to think that Roger spoke a language that only she understood, as if he were a horse and Anna-Lena some kind of equine translator, so she was always trying to interpret what he said to the rest of the world.

Parenthood can lead to a sequence of years when the children’s feelings suck all the oxygen out of a family, and that can be so emotionally intense that some adults go for years without having an opportunity to tell anyone about their own feelings, and if you don’t get a chance for long enough, sometimes you simply forget how to do it.

He’s in a home now. I hate the way that sounds, in a home, rather than living there.

he said three of the hardest words an older man can say to a younger woman: “You’ll manage it.”