Sara Barnard Quotes

I was sixteen, and I honestly believed I was due a love story.

Panic attacks are a lot like being drunk in some ways, you lose self-control. You cry for seemingly no reason. You deal with the hangover long into the next day.

I decide this is just A Bad Day. We all get them, because grief doesn't care how many years it's been.

People in pain can be very self-destructive. And sometimes they pull in the people who are close to them, often without realizing.

I was sixteen, and I honestly believed that I was due a love story.

Here are three separate but similar things: shyness, introversion and social anxiety. You can have one, two or all three of these things simultaneously. A lot of the time people thing they're all the same thing, but that's just not true. Extroverts can be shy, introverts can be bold, and a condition like anxiety can strike whatever kind of social animal you are. Lots of people are shy. Shy is normal. A bit of anxiety is normal. Throw the two together, add some brain-signal error - a NO ENTRY sign on the neural highway from my brain to my mouth perhaps, though no one really knows - and you have me.

I want the world, I think. Even if it scares me.

Someone like you is brilliant and amazing.' I said. 'Why can't you see that in yourself?' The unfairness of it was starting to sink in. If she could only see herself like I did, there wouldn't be a problem. But she didn't, and she never would, and that was so many levels of wrong and unfair I almost couldn't comprehend it.

And then it happens. The panic. It's slow at first, creeping through the cracks in my thoughts until everything starts to feel heavy. It builds; it becomes something physical that clutches at my insides and squeezes out the air and the blood.