Quotes from Heather Sellers

Becoming a writer means being creative enough to find the time and the place in your life for writing.

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

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

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 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.

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.

The railing of the balcony was cold but the blue-black night air was so warm in October, in Florida, it felt as if it could hold you, all that wetness like a blanket of kisses.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

Diagnoses, Dave thought, were rough guesses, blunt tools, always more inaccurate than they were helpful.

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.

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

When I thought about it, though, what I liked best about the session was that Helder said fuck. A good, hard word, a word with a life of its own, a fearless word. A rent in the dry elegance. Fuck.

I giggled and he took it very seriously and wrote everything down. I thought it was going too well, I was doing too well, it was going to look like nothing was wrong. I'm not this great! I wanted to say. Really, I'm a wreck, help! But I couldn't speak up. I smiled and tried to look brilliant.

He said I was learning to talk about my life more objectively so that it felt like a part of my life and not a part of myself.

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.

Helder said the goal of therapy was to make a container to hold all the disparate selves. I was going to need a big container. One that could hold hordes.

The feelings are overwhelming, but they're not you. They're the feelings. You are separate, and you are strong and amazing and good.

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.