quotes

"That was the most plausible answer to the question I wanted answered - not just "What am I doing here?" but the exponentially more consequential "What's wrong with me?" What defect was responsible for this terrible anxiety?

What defect? How about being a weakling? How about being a pushover? How about being shamefully, contemptibly, pathetically, unreservedly acquiescent to the wills of others? How about being so weak of will that you may as well not even have one?

It fit, this explanation... At moments of decision I treated my intuition in the opposite way everyone treated theirs, not as a handy volitional dispatch from the characterological depths but as a suspicious, mercurial, dubious voice from the same, mired in the chaos of existence and so best to be discounted in favor of more objective-seeming data - namely, other people's opinions. I shut my eyes, held out my hands, and asked other people to lead me. What else could I be but anxious?"

Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety
by Daniel Smith
pages 140-141
hardcover edition published by Simon & Schuster, 2012

posted by adam @ 1:36 AM