anxiety

Refuse to worry. Cast your anxiety upon the Lord. He cares for you.

It was hard to remember what I'd been so scared of. Being treated differently? Lack of acceptance? I was the one who hadn't accepted myself for who I was. I was the one who needed to be comfortable in my own skin. I hoped I could do that moving forward.

You are not stress...you are experiencing stress. You are not anxiety...you are experiencing anxiety. You are not fear...you are experiencing fear. You can recognize the fact that you are not your emotions and simply accept the experience of that emotion and move right through it.

Anxiety, and the physical symptoms it causes, is merely fog along the path of independence and discovery.

Fear and anxiety many times indicates that we are moving in a positive direction, out of the safe confines of our comfort zone, and in the direction of our true purpose.

People have worried about things for centuries, but it has never once had a positive effect on the outcome of a situation.

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.

Unbelief loves to paint the bleakest picture it can. It loves to get us mumbling to ourselves, I'm not going to make it. I just know this is going to turn out terrible. The future is bound to crash on me.Let me tell you that God, who began a good work in you, is not about to stop now. After sending his Son to die for your sins, after saving you at such incredible cost, why would he let you fail now?

I lay on my floor crying again_ shaking. Searching for inner strength and coming up empty. My eyes burned and my mouth was dry as I sucked on air that seemed to keep getting thicker and harder to breathe. I tried to leave again, but ended up leaning my forehead against the door, feeling defeated and wishing the Grim Reaper would come for me in all his silky, black glory.

Keep your problems to yourself, if its too much for you, kill it slowly till it disappears from your life.

Carry the confidence.

Confidence is what we get when we take fear, face it and replace it.

I really admire people who don__ need to live surrounded by lots of stuff. My bedroom is piled up with clothes and books, papers and photographs. I like to collect things, anything I can grab from wherever I__ travelling. I think it__ the sign of slight anxiety to always want something around you to represent a good moment you had, to hang on to the leftovers. But then they__e a pleasure to look at too, so it__ not all negative.

Conformity begins the moment you ignore how you feel for acceptance.

Worry is like a roller coaster ride that you think will take you somewhere, but it never does.

I realized that I was okay with myself. I was quirky and withdrawn and loud, but I liked that. I smiled at strangers without thinking they were going to attack me and drag me into their cars. I went to doctors_ offices and touched magazines that had been touched by sick people.

I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts--and they never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about the opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English civil war, of French wines--I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?