Easy Crafts for the Insane Quotes

“Maybe we all, at some point, find ourselves in the middle of a life that we do not recognize. Or maybe it’s just me. You go along to get along, you fake it ’til you make it, you follow the steps as you understand them and then, one day, you are the roadrunner off the cliff, still sprinting, supported by nothing but your own conviction that this is what one does. And then you are falling.”
― Kelly Williams Brown, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

“When you have no agency, nowhere to go, and nothing to do, time moves differently. It oozes and seeps by, becoming an oppressive and thick thing. There is absolutely nothing to be done with or in it. It is instead just something you wade slowly through on your way to . . . well, either leaving or dying, I guess.”
― Kelly Williams Brown, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

“I want to take care of people, not be taken care of. Being there in an emergency is my love language. If we’re friends, I will be there in the middle of the night. I will invite you to move into my house while you’re in the depths of this breakup. I will take you to the hospital and/or visit you when you’re there because the thought of you being alone, scared, and in pain is unbearable to me. But I really, really, really, really don’t want to have to ask you to do the same because what happens if I say, “I am truly hurting and need your help,” and you’re not there? It’s the worst thing I can imagine”
― Kelly Williams Brown, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

“I tried, in my unhealthy way, to put an end to our ongoing discord. I twisted and turned and contorted and moved as quietly as I could, but it seemed that no matter what I did, I always upset him, with words or actions or inaction, in ways that I could not predict. I couldn’t be someone who conducted herself in a manner he found acceptable, who didn’t warrant constant criticism.”
― Kelly Williams Brown, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

“People who haven’t been depressed assume it’s sadness, but that’s not it at all. It’s not a feeling; it’s the emotional flu, and it debilitates you. Things are going on around you, but you’re too sick to care.”
― Kelly Williams Brown, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

“I felt like I’d lost a layer of skin but couldn’t tell anyone. What do you even say as a mid-30s woman? Help, I’m sad. My friends don’t like me. The people in my life who I chose just unchose me?”
― Kelly Williams Brown, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

“I isolate because I can’t think of anything except my own pain and self-disgust, and those who can’t think of anyone but themselves aren’t the best company.”
― Kelly Williams Brown, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

“I’d skated too close to the sun, an Icarus who thought she was Nancy Kerrigan. God heard my self-aggrandizing thoughts and pushed me down on the ice. No, just kidding, that’s not how God works. (I don’t know how God works, but I have to assume that’s not it. Right?)”
― Kelly Williams Brown, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

“I’ve made a playlist of every song I’ve loved since I was 15. These songs remind me that I exist and remain the same person through space and time.”
― Kelly Williams Brown, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

“world had become. I’d dropped each joy, one by one, not noticing they were gone or really remembering I’d had them at all. I stopped listening to music, stopped dancing, stopped going on country drives. I stopped enjoying food, found no pleasure in good company, but instead a temporary lessening of misery, which made me a super-fun presence. Depression is so talented at turning you from a foodie into someone who wishes they could just eat a compressed nutrition bar every day, except about everything. I started to do and fall in love with all my favorite activities again, with gusto. I remembered what it was to put a new song I loved on repeat, to make little involuntary happy noises when biting into a soft ball of burrata, to push the Miata to 6,000 rpms, to rewrite Carly Rae Jepsen lyrics to be about my dog, to put on heels and a slip to mop while “Dangerous Woman” plays out of the speakers at full volume.”
― Kelly Williams Brown, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

“It’s a slightly modified Buddhist meditation I do, and I highly recommend it. First, I think of Eleanor and my Grannybarb, two beings for whom I feel nothing but the purest love, the wake-up-and-thank-God-every-morning gratitude. I hold that feeling in my heart for a moment, to get it nice and settled in, and then I try to transfer it to myself and say, “May I be well, happy, and peaceful.” I extend it to people in my life who have brought me to a new place, introduced a new way of thinking, or just remind me of who I am working to become, saying, “May my teachers be well, happy, and peaceful.” I do and say the same thing for my family and then my friends, all while trying to extend that same deep, uncritical love to each and every one. Then it’s the indifferent people: the sweet people at my local 7-Eleven or any random person I may have seen that day. I also wish for them to be well, happy, and peaceful. Now, here is the very hard part: I try, so hard, to extend that same love and hope for goodness to the unfriendly person, and in this case, I try to think of the people I feel the very least friendly to, who are Trump, Stephen Miller, armed protestors in state capitols, etc.”
― Kelly Williams Brown, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things