First, We Make the Beast Beautiful Quotes

“It can be a good thing, too, to learn to sit in your own weirdness.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“I said earlier that making decisions is a key anxiety trigger, If we drill down a bit we can see that this happens because we work to the belief there's a perfect decision out there to be made. But such a thing doesn't exist. And clutching at something that doesn't exist is enough to send anyone into a drowning panic.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“One of the dear, dear things about getting older, is that it does eventually dawn on you that there is no guidebook. One day it suddenly emerges: No one bloody gets it! None of us knows what we're doing.
Thing is, we all put a lot of effort into looking like we did get the guide, that of course we know how to do this caper called life. We put on a smile rather than tell friends we are desperately lonely. And we make loud, verbose claims at dinner parties to make everyone certain of our certainty. We're funny like that.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“The more anxious we are, the more high-functioning we will make ourselves appear, which just encourages the world to lean on us more.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“Studies show any movement, but particularly walking, will ease anxiety when we’re in the middle of a stress hormone surge. Indeed, the studies show that a mere 20–30 minute walk, five times a week, will make people less anxious, as effectively as antidepressants. Even better, the effect is immediate—serotonin, dopamine and endorphins all increase as soon as you start moving.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“I yearn for a complete sense of self; I’m not sure it’s something I can find or something I just have to wait for. I want to be authentic. I yearn to find the real me. I feel I am missing a connection with myself. But the thing is I want to find it while “life-ing.” I want to have yearning and be in this life. Everything seems to be fractured, rather than unified as my gut tells me ought to be the case. This stems from a yearning for the world to make sense, to fit together. I yearn for life direction and purpose. My dad’s illness made me question what I REALLY want to be doing with my life as I could inherit the illness and I don’t want to waste time. I want to wake up. I feel like a zombie going through the motions of work and married life and the real me is dormant. I want to know the real me, even if I have no idea what the real me is. To know the connection to a bigger force. To know that the universe has got this one. It burns at me every day to know that everything I’m doing makes sense.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“Anais Nin writes that anxiety can kill love. “It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”
Ain’t that the truth. I see that look on others’ faces when I’m drowning in one of my spirals. I know that many of the loved ones I’ve turned to, or allowed in to witness me in this state, have had to swim away from me and look after themselves, leaving me to drown. I’ve always feared that they think I’m going to strangle them emotionally with my complexity. So I usually send them on myself.
Sometimes, though, when I put in the work, my anxiety has seen love grow, not die. And so, anxiety can be the very thing that pushes us to become our best person. When worked through, dug through, sat through, anxiety can get us vulnerable and raw and open. And oh so real.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“Many of us with anxiety don’t look like we’ve got a problem because outwardly we function ludicrously well. Or so the merry story goes. Our anxiety sees us make industrious lists and plans, run purposefully from one thing to the next, and move fast upstairs and across traffic intersections. We are a picture of efficiency and energy, always on the move, always doing.
We’re Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh, always flitting about convinced everyone depends on us to make things happen and to be there when they do. And to generally attend to happenings.
But beneath that veneer were being pushed by fear and doubt and a voice that tells us we’re a bad husband, and insufficient sister, we’re wasting time, we’re not producing enough, - that we turn everything into a clusterfuck.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“I believe with all my heart that just understanding the metapurpose of the anxious struggle helps to make it beautiful. Purposeful, creative, bold, rich, deep things are always beautiful.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“Every man rushes elsewhere into the future because no man has arrived at himself. - Michel de Montaigne”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“We rush to escape what makes us anxious, which makes us anxious, and so we rush some more.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“Anxious behaviour is rewarded in our culture. Being high strung, wound up, frenetic and soooo busy has cachet. I ask someone, “How are you?” and even if they’re kicking back in a caravan park in the outback with a beer watching the sunset, their default response is, “Gosh, so busy, out of control, crazy times.” And they wear it as a badge of honour.
This means that many of us deny we have a problem and keep going and going. Indeed, the more anxious we are, the more we have to convince ourselves we don’t have a problem. This is ironic, or paradoxical. And it seems awfully cruel.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“Parisians might drop in for a coffee or an aperitif at cafés where the chairs face outward such that they can watch other flâneurs. They visit gardens and poke their heads into avenues and parks and galleries. Just to absorb and look and reflect. It’s a big part of the French psyche this simple observation of, and reflection upon, humanity. I love the spirit of it—sitting facing out to life. Then wandering among it. Then sitting back again. It’s thoroughly absorbing, which allows calm, paced, discerning thought bubbles to surface.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“Insomnia isn’t really to do with not being able to sleep; it’s about not having given ourselves a chance to think.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“To be anxious wasn’t shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be . . . more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be the person who saw with sharper eyes and felt with more active skin.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“Let’s take a look at how modern life goes. Mostly, it’s frenetic and at a pace that’s not conducive to reflective thought./
It’s all too fast for our human dimensions, as David Malouf put it. We don’t have time to adjust, to work out our priorities, and to reflect on whether what we’re doing when we’re running around madly is actually meaningful to us..
While we are meant to have more time (all those time-saving devices were meant to deliver just this, no?), we have less space. We are “on” 24/7. Every gap is filled. Even waiting at bus stops. We don’t leave work and unwind and stare into space for a bit, enjoying the sound of the birds, the soft dusk sunlight on fellow passenger’s faces. Nope, we must prune our social feeds./
Technology freed us up . . .to imprison us further. It’s created the imperative to go faster, to take on more ideas, and to juggle more. There are no excuses for not coming up with an answer, and immediately. Not when there’s Google./
But what if we need more time to know and to feel if it’s the right answer?”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“In it she wrote, of her depression, “That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“And what about this. When we’re thrust into it, we anxious folk can often deal with the present really rather well. It’s worth remembering this. As real, present-moment disasters occur, we invariably cope, and often better than others. The day after no sleep, I get on with things. At funerals, or when I’ve fallen off my bike, or the time I had to attend to my grandmother when she stopped breathing, or whenever a major work disaster plays out leaving my team in a panic, I’m a picture of calm. Dad used to call me “the tower of strength” in such moments. I also don’t tend to have a lot of bog-standard fear (as opposed to anxiety). In fact, I relish real, present-moment fear and actively seek it out.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“You choose. You might not even know why, but you do. You commit. Then you do the work. Oh, yeah. Then you falter. And fuck up. And go back to the beginning.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“This is the hoary deal-when you have got a mood disorder, few people are heavy enough and patient enough to anchor your ups and downs. And if you're high functioning in your anxiety, there are not many men (or women) out there who will actually take the kite string off you in the first place. And I do wonder if it's grossly unfair to ever expect them to be able to. I've often expected this of my partners. The expectation was too high for both of us, with all of them.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“Hiking connects us to ourselves. A University of Michigan study found that because our senses evolved in nature, by getting back to it we connect more honestly with our sensory reactions. Which connects us with our true selves, and enhances a feeling of “oneness.” Or perhaps we could say, a Something Else.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“Alex Korb writes in “The Grateful Brain,” “Gratitude can have such a powerful impact on your life because it engages your brain in a virtuous cycle. Your brain only has so much power to focus its attention. It cannot easily focus on both positive and negative stimuli.” Literally, you can’t be grateful and anxious at the same time. Once again, the threat system in our amygdala is overridden.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, which details her own struggle with bipolar disorder. A passage stood out for me: “The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.” The Chinese proverb puts things in the imperative. I prefer to phrase it as a gentle invitation: Let’s make our beast beautiful.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

“It’s easier to do something every day, without exception, than to do something “most days”,’ she said. ‘When you say “I’ll walk four days a week”, you debate which four days, and wake up debating whether you can skip Tuesday.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“I am not my sickness; I have a condition that can wander all lonely and cloudlike into view from time to time. I (the whole me) can choose to sit back and witness the clouds, let them be, let them pass.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“But self-mastery triumphs in this Modern Life of ours. So if we haven’t found happiness or calm or balance amidst it all - if we don’t cope - it’s because we’ve not tried hard enough. Because Modern Life dictates there’s an answer out there . . .you just have to try harder to find it and master it. Of course it doesn’t exist. So we are set up to fail.
I feel for younger people. I think they’re hit particularly hard by this doomed imperative. Many sociologists peg increased anxiety among teens and young adults to this phenomenon.
The standard solution is to consume - food, possessions, partners, gurus. If our self-worth is suffering, we’re told to buy a new moisturizer. Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, writes, “We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.”
Shia once again: “Today we’re told to do more stuff that has no purpose, which makes
anxious.”
Again, I think young people feel this acutely.
And here’s the dirty clincher: All of it drives us outward, away from our true selves and fro our yearning to know ourselves better. Plus, it drives us away from each other. Lack of community and belonging is cited by Dr. Jean Twenge, a social psychologist at San Diego State University and author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - And More Miserable Than Ever Before, as the primary driver of anxiety today. I’d include extensive quotes from Dr. Twenge, but I think the book title says it all.
Then (big sigh), when we do find it all too much, Modern Life slaps us with a “disorder” or disease diagnosis.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“He smiled through his greasy glasses with his clear eyes. “Why do we all expect to be happy? We all came out of our mothers crying. Pain is what we do.”
It reminded me of a tweet from Alain Botton several years back that sparked a Twitter chat between the two of us: “Happiness is generally impossible for longer than fifteen minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.”
Indeed. The great worriers of history were the ones who saw the charging rhinoceros first, had an action plan ready to go should a tiger in camp, fretted that the basket of weeds collected that they may be poisonous. We carry this terror in our genes into our suburban lounge rooms, to our office water coolers, to our IKEA-issue bedrooms.
Worry is our default position.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“It was too much of a gear change back then in the half an hour desperately trying to put the brakes on my frantic overthinking only made things worse. So did the acute awareness that everyone else seem to be able to do something that I couldn’t.
But in that moment in the scout hall with the sun streaming in, I touched a still, settled, vast, spacious, magnificent knowing at my core. It was only for a few delicate moments, but there was no going back. The scab was removed and the rawness - the “Something Else” I’d been looking for - was finally exposed. I call it the Something Else because there’s no other way of describing this yearning - this indescribable thing or place or energy I’d been looking for - that came before words.
But now I’d touched it.
And goddamn it I wanted to touch it again.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety