Heather Sellers Quotes

You don't have to have clarity," he said, "to take a clear position.

Don't get sucked in, Dave was always saying to me. Kind of like Helder's container idea: Notice everything, but don't buy into it. Hold it.

As children, we are profoundly loyal to our parents, and to their pain: I wanted to be related to my mom, not ruined by her

Mental illness didn't really change people. It just made them more of who they were going to be anyway. Mental illness was less like obliteration, more like italics.

I treat my writing life like a fabulous, enchanting lover, because that is what it is to me. Something that is terribly time consuming, delicious and time-stopping. I have missed important meetings for love, and I will continue to put my writing life in the same position. My writing life is the lover at the center, not the neglected cranky demanding millstone, my ball and chain.
When you are love, truly and passionately, you don't have to write down in your daily schedule "Spend quality time with Lover today. You can't not.

I truly missed my parents. I wanted to miss them. It was the only way I could love them, a crazy cocktail of longing and pretending and absence and hope.

I was going to be in therapy for a long, long time. I wasn't even a sentence yet. But I had some syllables, some new sounds. The first halves of the sentences I was accumulating were solid. I trusted them.

Schizophrenia is without a doubt the most dreaded psychological disorder. If depression is the common cold of psychological disorders, schizophrenia is the cancer." The cancer.

I'd set out to write a book about how we learn to trust our own experience in the face of confusion, doubt, and anxiety. What I ended up with is the story of how we love each other in spite of immense limitations

I started writing everything down.I wrote for the same reason someone lost sticks a message in a bottle.
I'm here. Help. Please find me.

I couldn't bear to think of my mother loving me but unable to face me, to stare into my eyes, to care for me emotionally, to offer me her face. Like any daughter, as much as I wanted to separate from her, I wanted to be deeply connected to her, I wanted to redeem her, I wanted to protect her. I wanted to love and to understand, in that order.

How, I asked, could I have gone my whole life not knowing about my mother? How could I have not known what Keith knew when he saw our house? "It's your mom," Helder said. "Because it's Mom." He sounded firm and knowing and clear. "When a child has an alcoholic father, he sees him drink all day long but he doesn't have a label, a concept. You just know that at night, when the tires make a certain sound in the driveway and the doors slam a certain way, with a certain sound, you just know you need to hide.

Find ways to develop self-awareness so you know what you do well... you do a thousand things brilliantly, and if you don't know what they are you aren't going to be able to become a true evaluator of your own work or other people's.

I loved the idea of a subversive world where mental illness was defined as just another version of normal, and education was how you made your way in the world, not something that began or ended.

When you write, you believe in something no one else can see. You spend lots of time committed to a project for which there are no assurances, no guarantees. Being a writer subjects you to the same doubts, the same unpopularity, the same nagging questions that believers struggle with. Writing is communing with the unseen…

Writing is making a mess, and then working and reworking to create a beautiful piece.

Off and on for many years, I tried to write a book about my childhood. I'd bring chapters to workshop, to writing group, and I always got the same comments: How could you live this way? How could you survive this? It's too raw. You don't speak to these people, do you? I was deeply hurt by these reactions, and also confused. This was my mother. I loved her. This was my family. My life. How could it be too raw?

I know how to wait for clarity to emerge from chaos. I know what it is to trust in the power of the unseen.

Trust the comfy clothes you reach for day after day, your plain, regular, essential self.

Writing is a physical art. And writing a book is a lot more like making a complex sculpture out of bronze than writing a whole bunch of reports. What's in your head does not count, not for sculpture, not for book writing. Pencil on paper is what matters. Words on paper, pages and pages, chapter after chapter.

Writing a book is exactly like love. You don't hold back. You give it everything you have. If it doesn't work out, you're heartbroken, but you move forward and start again anyway. You have to.
You don't hold some of yourself in reserve. It's all or nothing. There are no guarantees.

In childhood, it's our parents who give us our standards for experience: "Here's an inch," they say. "And this is a foot." And a child says, "Thanks! I can make my own yardstick now." In my family, there wasn't any kind of calibration demonstration. In the chaos, I struggled to figure out anything at all.

When something makes no sense, sometimes you make something of it. A joke. A spiritual practice. A life.