Quotes from Daniel B. Smith

Freedom is anxiety's petri dish. If routine blunts anxiety, freedom incubates it. Freedom says, Even if you don't want to make choices, you have to, and you can never be sure you have chosen correctly. Freedom says, Even not to choose is to choose. Freedom says, So long as you are aware of your freedom, you are going to experience the discomfort that freedom brings. Freedom says, You're on your own. Deal with it.

Guilt at least has a purpose; it tells us we've violated some ethical code. Ditto for remorse. Those feelings are educational; they manufacture wisdom. But regret—regret is useless.

This is why therapists go to such lengths to urge their anxious patients away from intellectualization: The first step toward peace is disarmament.

The bargain was this: Admit the anxiety as an essential part of yourself and in exchange that anxiety will be converted into energy, unstable but manageable. Stop with the self-flagellating and become yourself, with scars and tics.

I felt so skinless at times! Things hit me so hard!

The hard work, you discover over the years, is in learning to discern between correct and incorrect anxiety, between the anxiety that's trying to warn you about a real danger and the anxiety that's nothing more than a lying, sadistic, unrepentant bully in your head. The hard work is in learning to step back and analyze the data dispassionately.

Anxiety compels a person to think, but it is the type of thinking that gives thinking a bad name: solipsistic, self-eviscerating, unremitting, vicious.

There is no such thing as a good decision and a bad decision. There are only decisions. Make them, fuck up, enjoy, repeat.

Singin' In the Rain might get you through an anxious week or two, but it won't get you through an anxious life. For that you need either a brain transplant (the only procedure of its kind, it has been said, in which it is better to be a donor than a recipient), a fully stocked bomb shelter, or a thorough adjustment of your perspective on existential risk and reward.

If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn't a bad metaphor for anxiety—as a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how taxing it can be. To have one in your head is enough to make you comatose.

Anxiety and panic happen to be mundane phenomena, i.e., even when they are caused by extraordinary things like war and rape, they tend to occur when things are ordinary and predictable and relatively stable, against a backdrop of normal, everyday experience. This, of course, is one of the features of anxiety and panic that make them suck so bad.

Learning to address concerns methodically, with reference to logic and empirical evidence, is one of the most useful things an anxious person can do.

The hard work, you discover over the years, is in learning to discern between correct and incorrect anxiety, between the anxiety that's trying to warn you about a real danger and the anxiety that's nothing more than a lying, sadistic, unrepentant bully in your head.

He isn't trying to transform himself into something different; he's trying to transform someone different back into himself.

Freud was of the opinion that in fear a person is responding to a specific and immediate threat to physical safety while in anxiety a person is responding to a threat that is objectless, directionless, and located somewhere far off in the future—ruination, for example, or humiliation, or decay.

One of the things anxiety educates you in is how deeply physical thought can be, how concrete. In anxiety, there is no time to luxuriate in abstractions. It's just you and your mind, which has fists and is using them. It may be dualistic and logically untenable to posit the situation as You v. Head; it may not make sense philosophically. But in the throes of anxiety? In the cognitive shit? There's really no other way to think about what's going on.

It's like I've had a stroke. Do you think I've had a stroke? I don't think you've had a stroke. But how do you know? How can you be sure I haven't had a stroke? What are the symptoms of a stroke? I don't know. Look them up. Look them up on line. OK. Hold on...OK. Here it is. Do you have trouble speaking? I have trouble speaking intelligently.

Even the imperative to make choice after choice without clear guidance - allegedly the most nerve-wracking part of the profession - isn't exclusive to writing.

This is the trouble with origin hunting. There are so many origins.

To be anxious wasn't shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be alive to life's contradictions, more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be a person who saw with sharper eyes and felt with more active skin. It was to be a writer, and I wanted in.

the feeling of having in the middle of my body a ball of wool that quickly winds itself up, its innumerable threads pulling from the surface of my body to itself.

And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night.

Whenever a person is faced in life with a choice, his whole being trembles with the dilemma of what to do.

I wasn't weak or oversensitive; I was precocious. I didn't have a deficit of strength; I had a deficit of years.