Bad Vibes Only Quotes

“I'm only as good as my next achievement; I allow myself anywhere between five to eight minutes to happiness about any accomplishment before shifting immediately into what's next, and how I can make it better. We are all exhausting, gaping holes of need trying to fill the void with perfection and progress and the pursuit of more and better, aching for a sheet of gold-stars and a grown-up to tell us that we belong here.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“My sister Meghan was smart and beautiful... if only she'd lose weight. Fat was a concern, an error, something to be cured of; a but between you and everything good. I hated overhearing these comments, hated how they made my ears flush red in embarrassment and anger, hated how they revealed a secret side of life where even the people who love you the most could also be privately cataloging your flaws. What did they not like about me? What ways could I be improved upon? I hated even more how relieved I was to be skinny, and what a coward I was to overhear all this and say nothing in defense of the people I loved.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“Anything can happen, and it does, but we cannot live every day with the awareness that we are small and fragile creatures, vulnerable spirits in inadequate vessels made of breakable bones and soft tissue. Parenthood in particular requires that we live in two realities; we must believe that the world will help up keep our children alive while also knowing that our environment is ambivalent at best, that something as small as a peanut or as large as an impressive body of water is all that stands between our child and death.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“I want to experience aging in all its fullness. I do not, however, want to look it.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“To admit this—a hopelessly unfashionable addiction to the appearance of my body—is a crime in some circles. It's much more becoming to "embrace your flaws" or—even better—to not see your body's flaws at all, to firmly believe that your physical appearance is immaterial and unimportant, that your body is simply a vessel for your soul and your personality. Personally, I've found the undoing of generations of social conditioning to be slow going.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“He can say he forgives me, sure, but I know better. In therapy, I work on forgiving myself.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“How frightening to know that your brain can betray you this way, that the vessel for our sense of self is often faulty and prone to error. How awful to know that death may come for us over and over, snatching pieces of us little by little until all that is left to take is our body.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“He will learn that the best way to keep people comfortable is to hide your own discomfort or deny it entirely. He will learn to fake it until he makes it, to betray himself in a million ways, just like his mother.

I don't know when I learned that "dine" was the correct answer to "how are you?" but nobody ever had to explicitly tell me that "Well, I'm teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown" is definitely not the answer your colleague is looking for while you pass each other in the hallways between your many overlapping meetings. It doesn't take a psychology degree to understand that some things are just more pleasant than others, and that as comfort-seeking mammals with disposable income we are attracted to the pleasant, the way.

And yes, we know that "lie is hard," but we also really want it to be hard in ways that are manageable and more inconvenient than difficult. We want our setbacks to be setting us up for comebacks, and more than anything, we want to be able to alchemize our pain into something shiny and good: a lesson learned, a warning sign for others. Our suffering is just a vehicle for our self-improvement.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“I hope that all my children live free of any rhyming aphorism that encourages them to keep striving when it’s clear that C’s not only get degrees but produce C-suite executives.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“Because no, this is not what happens on my version of the internet, where opinions are either inconsequential (what does your coffee mug really say about you?) or authoritative, loud and devoid of all nuance.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“Anxiety is a serious and sometimes debilitating mental health issue that affects millions of people worldwide, but when you’re, say, trying to explain to another person who has not fallen down the spiral staircase of your worst thoughts why exactly you’re unable to walk through a grocery store without imagining every single can, shelf, and cart rotting in a future landfill, poisoning our soil and returning as radioactive carrots and kale, you have to admit that it’s also… a little embarrassing.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“Choosing a therapist is like dating; it’s supposed to be perfectly acceptable to shop around, to ask questions and figure out if it’s a mutual fit before you move forward into a relationship. But I never dated that way; I either settled for whoever liked me or, in the case of both my marriages, tripped and fell right into the exact right match. Same for therapy.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“It's that fear-that I'm really just space junk-that has seemed to drive every version of myself. I've spent years collecting accomplishments and taking little to no joy or satisfaction in any of them, constnatly thirsting like Tantalus rooted in his pool of water.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only

“And I saw the river over which every soul must pass to reach the Kingdom of Heaven And the name of that river was suffering. And I saw the boat which carries souls across the river And the name of that boat was love.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only