Sara Barnard Quotes

Here are three separate but similar things: shyness, introversion and social anxiety. You can have one, two or all three of these things simultaneously. A lot of the time people thing they're all the same thing, but that's just not true. Extroverts can be shy, introverts can be bold, and a condition like anxiety can strike whatever kind of social animal you are.

Lots of people are shy. Shy is normal. A bit of anxiety is normal. Throw the two together, add some brain-signal error - a NO ENTRY sign on the neural highway from my brain to my mouth perhaps, though no one really knows - and you have me.

Speak your truth, even if your voice shakes

Someone like you is brilliant and amazing.' I said. 'Why can't you see that in yourself?' The unfairness of it was starting to sink in. If she could only see herself like I did, there wouldn't be a problem. But she didn't, and she never would, and that was so many levels of wrong and unfair I almost couldn't comprehend it.

And then it happens. The panic. It's slow at first, creeping through the cracks in my thoughts until everything starts to feel heavy. It builds; it becomes something physical that clutches at my insides and squeezes out the air and the blood.

It's total bullshit. I hate it when people make sadness all deep and beautiful and, like- profound. That's the word it's not profound. It's not beautiful. It sucks. It sucks balls. I think it makes non-sad people feel better. Like, they think if must be a good thing to be sad, because you're getting all this insight into real life and pain or whatever. Like how people say tears are like rain. Fuck off. Tears are just tears and they make your eyes hurt and they won stop when you want them to and ugh you get all those arty photos of girls crying - it's always girls, have you noticed?- and it's so beautiful and tasteful and moving. When the reality is your face goes all blotchy and your nose runs and you can taste it every time you breathe'
'Taste what?'
'It. Pain. Sadness. I'm just saying that sadness isn't beautiful and if it looks that way, it's a lie.

Even when you see it coming, there's no avoiding the inevitable.

Panic attacks are a lot like being drunk in some ways, you lose self-control. You cry for seemingly no reason. You deal with the hangover long into the next day.

Valerie: Yeah. You know I'm a massive nerd. You don't get that way from liking things to be easy all the time.
Me: That's true. You're a massive nerd.
Valerie: Well, all the best ones are.

Little victories are everything in a world where worst-case scenarios are on an endless loop in your head

Sometimes it just takes that one person to see beyond what everyone tells them they're meant to see.

There is no enough.' Tarin flicked her indicator on, the clicking noise filling the car as she merged on to the motorway. 'You seem to be forgetting that she's in a clinical facility getting professional help. Which is great, obviously. Let them worry about how to deal with depression. You're going to visit your friend, remember? Yes, she's a patient, but she's not your patient. So for God's sake, don't treat her like one.

What are you thinking, Steffi? What are you thinking?
Everything, all the time.
You're so quiet, Steffi. Why are you so quiet?
But in my head it's so loud.
I'm sure everyone has an inner monologue, but I doubt many are as wordy as mine.

People talk about friendship like it's only about shared loves, but it's not. It's also about finding the same things annoying and getting excited about the same silly, irrelevant things. It's the person you can share a joke with, sure. But it's also the person you can subtly roll your eyes at when someone else is talking too loudly. The person who makes the fun things better and the boring things more bearable. That's Bonnie for me.

To you, Rhys says.
To you, I respond.
He grins. To us. Bronze and Gold.

I was sixteen, and I honestly believed that I was due a love story.

See how small it is, Eden?' he said. 'You remember that, if life ever feels too much. It's all so very small.

People in pain can be very self-destructive. And sometimes they pull in the people who are close to them, often without realizing.

But people we love come and go, Caddy. That doesn't mean we loved them any less at the time.

With lightning, you're never really sure if that's what it was; it's just a flash. Thunder, you know. You feel it.'
'You can keep your quiet thunder. I'll keep the exciting lightning.

I decide this is just A Bad Day. We all get them, because grief doesn't care how many years it's been.