Umm Abdurahman > Umm's Quotes

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“You are a question to yourself. You’ve become a question to all those who meet you, those who know you (...). You doubt, at times, if you exist outside your own thoughts, outside your own head.”
― Nuruddin Farah, Maps

“How do we observe patience?” “In the same manner that we fast; completely certain that the adhān of Maghrib will eventually be called.”
― B. B. Abdulla, Timeless Seeds of Advice: The Sayings of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ , Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn al-Qayyim, Ibn al-Jawzi and Other Prominent Scholars in Bringing Comfort and Hope to the Soul

“You can’t escape it: when scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it is laced with antidepressants, because so many of us are taking them and excreting them that they simply can’t be filtered out of the water we drink every day.9 We are literally awash in these drugs.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“Today they are all around us. Some one in five4 U.S. adults is taking at least one drug for a psychiatric problem; nearly one in four5 middle-aged women in the United States is taking antidepressants at any given time; around one in ten6 boys at American high schools is being given a powerful stimulant to make them focus; and addictions to legal and illegal drugs are now so widespread that the life expectancy of white men is declining for the first time in the entire peacetime history of the United States.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“I was told by my doctor that I was suffering from both depression and acute anxiety. I had believed that those were separate problems, and that is how they were discussed for the thirteen years I received medical care for them. But I noticed something odd as I did my research. Everything that causes an increase in depression also causes an increase in anxiety, and the other way around. They rise and fall together.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“Professor Irving Kirsch, and by the time I went to see him in Massachusetts, he was associate director of a leading program at Harvard Medical School.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“in 1965, a British doctor called Alec Coppen came up with a theory. What if, he asked, all these drugs were increasing levels of serotonin in the brain? If that were true, it would suggest that depression might be caused by low levels of serotonin”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“In young people, [these chemical antidepressants] increase the risk18 of suicide. There’s a new Swedish study showing that it increases the risk of violent criminal behavior,” Irving continued. “In older people it increases the risk of death from all causes, increases the risk of stroke. In everybody, it increases the risk of type 2 diabetes. In pregnant women, it increases the risk of miscarriage [and] of having children born with autism or physical deformities. So all of these things are known.” And if you start experiencing these effects, it can be hard to stop—about 20 percent of people experience serious withdrawal symptoms.19”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most. John calls this a “snowball” effect, as disconnection spirals into more disconnection.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“To end loneliness, you need other people—plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you. You have to be in it together—and “it” can be anything that you both think has meaning and value.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions

“Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said—it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions