Quotes About Coping

When I was at university in England, I went through a difficult phase. Outwardly everything seemed fine, and I was doing really well academically, but I was suffering from anxiety and frequent panic attacks and found it so difficult to reach out for help without people undermining my abilities.

When tragedy strikes, feeling helpless is understandable.

It's understandable why someone might not want to take on a book they think is emotionally hard.

When my mother died of cancer in 2014, my father was quick to reinvent himself. Within a year, he moved to Thailand, became obsessed with scuba diving and consumer-grade underwater photography, and proposed to a Burmese woman in her mid-30s, an engagement he broke off within a year or two.

One day I looked at something in myself that I had been avoiding because it was too painful. Yet once I did, I had an unexpected surprise. Rather than self-hatred, I was flooded with compassion for myself because I realized the pain necessary to develop that coping mechanism to begin with.

Nothing to me is unexpected. No disappointment is unexpected - whether it's movies or people or relationships. I'm always ready for the punch directly between the eyes. So I get hurt, but I never get hurt. Happens all the time.

My comfort wasn't the most important thing - my getting through to the other side of difficult feelings was. However long it might seem to take, and however unfair it might seem, it was my job to do it.

I have increasingly steeled myself to criticism, but it still can sting, especially when you feel that it is unfair - or that they are judging my book by its cover or by preconceived notions.

As someone who has faced as much disappointment as most people, I've come to trust not that events will always unfold exactly as I want, but that I will be fine either way.

Sometimes, getting comfortable with the circumstance is the only preparation you need to deal with it.

If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it.

When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping.

If I get in a dark spot, I'll listen to some Adele and cry about it.

When your spouse is given a bleak prognosis, you become an expert in soaking up every moment of every day.

I think everybody has had emotional distress, but yes, I think I'm pretty stable.

Stage fright is a real thing. It's debilitating to some people.

There are many stages of grief.

I know there are five stages of grief, but my parents raised me to pull up my socks when times get tough.

When things get really bad, just raise your glass and stamp your feet and do a little jig. That's about all you can do.

Some people's developmental path has not equipped them to stand up and let go of something.

I know how to stand up to a bully - but maybe more importantly how to work around a bully.

With wives, men hide behind the air of bravado, which is basically a defence mechanism, I think. Clever creatures, women. Very clever.

All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.

Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.