Notes on a Nervous Planet

The knowledge of so much suffering in the world didn’t help put my pain in perspective. It just made me feel powerless. And pathetic that my invisible woes were so paralysing when there were so many visible woes in the world.

feeling bad sucks

MAYBE HAPPINESS IS not about us, as individuals. Maybe it is not something that arrives into us. Maybe happiness is felt heading out, not in. Maybe happiness is not about what we deserve because we’re worth it. Maybe happiness is not about what we can get. Maybe happiness is about what we already have. Maybe happiness is about what we can give. Maybe happiness is not a butterfly we can catch with a net. Maybe there is no certain way to be happy. Maybe there are only maybes.

Suicide. Although I was suicidal when I was younger, and very nearly threw myself off a cliff, in more recent times my obsession with suicide became more a fear of doing it, rather than a will to do it.

In fact, now I think about it, that is the chief characteristic of anxiety for me. The continual imagining of how things could get so much worse.

ONE FRUSTRATION WITH anxiety is that it is often hard to find a reason behind it. There may be no visible threat and yet you can feel utterly terrified. It’s all intense suspense, no action. It’s like Jaws without the shark.

I want to know if one of the reasons I sometimes feel like I am on the brink of a breakdown is partly because the world sometimes seems on the brink of a breakdown.

I am petrified of where my mind can go, because I know where it has already been.

how can we live in a mad world without ourselves going mad?

So, as physical health and mental health are intertwined, couldn’t the same be said about the modern world and our mental states? Couldn’t aspects of how we live in the modern world be responsible for how we feel in the modern world?