Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. Especially if you have other people you’re trying to be a reasonably good human being for.

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.

Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn’t feel like it’s ours. Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don’t know how, because it’s so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up.

“If your head isn’t up to the job, your legs better be!”

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.

children used to be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force children to come out of them. One generation got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told off for never moving.

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.

sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.

We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of “Don’t Forget!”s and “Remember!”s over us.

One technique I’d recommend is to ask yourself three questions before you flare up. One: Are the actions of the person in question intended to harm you personally? Two: Do you possess all the information about the situation? Three: Do you have anything to gain from a conflict?”

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.

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

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?

You can always tell by the way people who love each other argue: the longer they’ve been together, the fewer words they need to start a fight.

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.

“Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?” “No.” “You’re never more important than you are then.”

“We probably make all the same mistakes that your generation did. Just different versions of them.”

“There’s something romantic about the thought of all the apartments that aren’t for sale.”

Sometimes we don’t need distance, just barriers.