Heather Sellers Quotes

#1. The feelings are overwhelming, but they're not you. They're the feelings. You are separate, and you are strong and amazing and good.

Heather Sellers

#2. I started writing everything down.I wrote for the same reason someone lost sticks a message in a bottle.
I'm here. Help. Please find me.

Heather Sellers

#3. I loved the idea of a subversive world where mental illness was defined as just another version of normal, and education was how you made your way in the world, not something that began or ended.

Heather Sellers

#4. I know how to wait for clarity to emerge from chaos. I know what it is to trust in the power of the unseen.

Heather Sellers

#5. I'd set out to write a book about how we learn to trust our own experience in the face of confusion, doubt, and anxiety. What I ended up with is the story of how we love each other in spite of immense limitations

Heather Sellers

#6. You don't have to have clarity," he said, "to take a clear position.

Heather Sellers

#7. I giggled and he took it very seriously and wrote everything down. I thought it was going too well, I was doing too well, it was going to look like nothing was wrong. I'm not this great! I wanted to say. Really, I'm a wreck, help! But I couldn't speak up. I smiled and tried to look brilliant.

Heather Sellers

#8. Diagnoses, Dave thought, were rough guesses, blunt tools, always more inaccurate than they were helpful.

Heather Sellers

#9. Trust the comfy clothes you reach for day after day, your plain, regular, essential self.

Heather Sellers

#10. Writing a book is exactly like love. You don't hold back. You give it everything you have. If it doesn't work out, you're heartbroken, but you move forward and start again anyway. You have to.
You don't hold some of yourself in reserve. It's all or nothing. There are no guarantees.

Heather Sellers

#11. The railing of the balcony was cold but the blue-black night air was so warm in October, in Florida, it felt as if it could hold you, all that wetness like a blanket of kisses.

Heather Sellers

#12. Mental illness didn't really change people. It just made them more of who they were going to be anyway. Mental illness was less like obliteration, more like italics.

Heather Sellers

#13. Schizophrenia is without a doubt the most dreaded psychological disorder. If depression is the common cold of psychological disorders, schizophrenia is the cancer." The cancer.

Heather Sellers

#14. Writing is making a mess, and then working and reworking to create a beautiful piece.

Heather Sellers

#15. Becoming a writer means being creative enough to find the time and the place in your life for writing.

Heather Sellers

#16. Don't get sucked in, Dave was always saying to me. Kind of like Helder's container idea: Notice everything, but don't buy into it. Hold it.

Heather Sellers

#17. When I thought about it, though, what I liked best about the session was that Helder said fuck. A good, hard word, a word with a life of its own, a fearless word. A rent in the dry elegance. Fuck.

Heather Sellers

#18. I truly missed my parents. I wanted to miss them. It was the only way I could love them, a crazy cocktail of longing and pretending and absence and hope.

Heather Sellers

#19. Find ways to develop self-awareness so you know what you do well... you do a thousand things brilliantly, and if you don't know what they are you aren't going to be able to become a true evaluator of your own work or other people's.

Heather Sellers

#20. When something makes no sense, sometimes you make something of it. A joke. A spiritual practice. A life.

Heather Sellers

#21. He said I was learning to talk about my life more objectively so that it felt like a part of my life and not a part of myself.

Heather Sellers

#22. Helder said the goal of therapy was to make a container to hold all the disparate selves. I was going to need a big container. One that could hold hordes.

Heather Sellers

#23. As children, we are profoundly loyal to our parents, and to their pain: I wanted to be related to my mom, not ruined by her

Heather Sellers

#24. I was going to be in therapy for a long, long time. I wasn't even a sentence yet. But I had some syllables, some new sounds. The first halves of the sentences I was accumulating were solid. I trusted them.

Heather Sellers