Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

humor is the soul’s last line of defense, and as long as we’re laughing we’re alive,

they had all heard one another’s stories, and that made it harder to dislike one another,

Empathy is like vertigo.

She wants to say sorry. So does he. It’s a harder word than you might think,

For Anna-Lena it feels like coming home, and for Roger, like being good enough.

But I think we pass people in the street every day who feel the same as you and I, many of them just don’t know what it is. 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.

It wasn’t your fault.

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.

Perhaps that’s the last lifeline an addicted parent clings to, the idea that their child probably doesn’t know. As if the chaos could possibly be hidden. It can’t even be buried, the daughter thought, it just gets handed down.

“We’re not worried about losing you, Mom. We just want you to know that you’re never going to lose us.”

Their mom couldn’t help thinking that she and their dad had at least gotten something right, because the girls were capable of admitting when they were wrong, and of forgiving others when they got things wrong.

You saved yourself. He just happened to be there.