Quotes About Insecurity

He was a boy composed of pieces just loosely held together, and the centrifugal spin of this latest terror could pull his loose bits apart. No magical belief in hummingbirds and glowworms could put him back together if that happened

Using both experiments and field data, a recent study found that economic insecurity was associated with increased consumption of painkillers and produced actual physical pain and reduced pain tolerance, with the absence of control providing one mechanism explaining these results.

One study of relatively highly paid contractors in Silicon Valley found that free agents didn't really feel free because of the need to be always searching for their next gig and therefore frequently took less leisure time than regular employees.

When I'm able to slough it off, when it's not causing physical symptoms or putting me on edge, my anxiety still pops up out of nowhere to spoil nice moments. I fear good things happening because I believe something bad is sure to follow.

bundle of nerves, swaddled in a blanket of panic.

My whole life I've harbored a resentment toward those who could ride no-handed. To this day, I can't even sit on an exercise bike without clinging to the handlebars with a serious G.I.-Joe- kung-fu grip. Every time I see someone on the road, all smug and well-balanced, using their cell phone and gesturing while they talk and ride, I secretly want to bash them with my car door. It's

I'm a bundle of nerves, swaddled in a blanket of panic.

Because if you base your self-worth on what everyone else thinks of you, you hand all your power over to other people and become dependent on a source outside of yourself for validation. Then you wind up chasing after something you have no control over, and should that something suddenly place its focus somewhere else, or change its mind and decide you're no longer very interesting, you end up with a full-blown identity crisis.

Because so often when we say we're unqualified for something, what we're really saying is that we're too scared to try it, not that we can't do it.

Being thin created intense anxiety that I wouldn't be able to maintain that weight for life, and I couldn't.

isn't that what happens in us in our lives? Don't we all reach out in our nights and our days, full of some mysterious agenda, and hope another person can somehow read our minds and give us our heart's desire? I wonder why we are like this. What happens to us along the way that makes us so afraid to ask for what we really want? And what do we become when we lose that ability?

If you keep hearing negative things about yourself, they start to seep into your consciousness and you start to feel like they're true. They cloud who you know you really are and you can lose yourself.

Is it still there? I asked, staring at his head, bent over, as he wedged the stethoscope beneath my left breast. And then, before I could stop myself, Does it sound broken?

She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp you so that you'd lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer.

I could have told him that nothing was safe and that no matter how careful you were and how hard you tried, there were still accidents, hidden traps, and snares. You could get killed on an airplane or crossing the street. Your marriage could fall apart when you weren't looking; your husband could lose his job; our baby could get sick or die.

sometimes—a lot of the time—it felt like her skin no longer fit her, and her body was only a collection of flaws to be fixed or at least disguised, an endless source of despair.

Did any love ever feel as sweet as first love? Were we all just damaged goods now, battered cans in the grocery store sale bin, day old bread, marked down at the registered, hoping that someone would look past the obvious flaws and love us enough to take us home?

People don't like to see things that aren't perfect. It reminds them of what could go wrong in their own lives, I guess.

I shut my eyes, assaulted by a sudden vision of Bruce and his new girl in his wide, warm bed, his arm wrapped companionably around her, telling my family secrets...and the new girl would give a wise, professionally compassionate kindergarten-teacher nod, all the while thinking what a freak I must be.

The new pills made my body feel loose and springy, warmed from the inside, but I didn't think there was a chemical yet invented that could have quelled my insecurity, or convinced me, in that moment, that my husband loved me still. A

I'd lost . . . ten pounds? Twelve? Enough to make me believe that if I just kept at it I could lose the weight, the percentage of myself, that would finally make my body acceptable. Enough to make me believe that a man could like me, could look past my current incarnation and see the beauty that would be revealed when I dropped another thirty pounds.

She is fifteen years old that summer, a thoughtful, book-struck girl with long-lashed hazel eyes and a long-legged body that still doesn't completely feel like her own.

I knew that on Monday there was every chance she would ignore me. It wouldn't matter. I would still want to be her friend, because she was everything I wanted to be. She was beautiful, and funny, and glamorous; a long, unfurled ribbon of cool, where I was a sweaty pretzeled knot of striving

She'd learned that his wife's real name was not Daisy. It was Diana, and, somehow, that unsettled her almost as badly as finding the picture had. It made her think that she was the rough-draft Diana, the one who got crumpled up and tossed in the trash, while his wife was the final version, the one who was beloved, cherished, marriage material.