Heather Sellers Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

When something makes no sense, sometimes you make something of it. A joke. A spiritual practice. A life. — Heather Sellers

I think everyone has one day like this, and some people have more than one. It's the day of the accident, the midlife crisis, the breakdown, the meltdown, the walkout, the sellout, the giving up, giving away, or giving in. The day you stop drinking, or the day you start. The day you know things will never be the same again. — Heather Sellers

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

In childhood, it's our parents who give us our standards for experience: "Here's an inch," they say. "And this is a foot." And a child says, "Thanks! I can make my own yardstick now." In my family, there wasn't any kind of calibration demonstration. In the chaos, I struggled to figure out anything at all. — Heather Sellers

I couldn't bear to think of my mother loving me but unable to face me, to stare into my eyes, to care for me emotionally, to offer me her face. Like any daughter, as much as I wanted to separate from her, I wanted to be deeply connected to her, I wanted to redeem her, I wanted to protect her. I wanted to love and to understand, in that order. — Heather Sellers

Off and on for many years, I tried to write a book about my childhood. I'd bring chapters to workshop, to writing group, and I always got the same comments: How could you live this way? How could you survive this? It's too raw. You don't speak to these people, do you? I was deeply hurt by these reactions, and also confused. This was my mother. I loved her. This was my family. My life. How could it be too raw? — Heather Sellers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming a writer means being creative enough to find the time and the place in your life for writing. — Heather Sellers

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

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

Writing is a physical art. And writing a book is a lot more like making a complex sculpture out of bronze than writing a whole bunch of reports. What's in your head does not count, not for sculpture, not for book writing. Pencil on paper is what matters. Words on paper, pages and pages, chapter after chapter. — Heather Sellers

Diagnoses, Dave thought, were rough guesses, blunt tools, always more inaccurate than they were helpful. — Heather Sellers

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

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

How, I asked, could I have gone my whole life not knowing about my mother? How could I have not known what Keith knew when he saw our house? "It's your mom," Helder said. "Because it's Mom." He sounded firm and knowing and clear. "When a child has an alcoholic father, he sees him drink all day long but he doesn't have a label, a concept. You just know that at night, when the tires make a certain sound in the driveway and the doors slam a certain way, with a certain sound, you just know you need to hide. — Heather Sellers

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

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

I treat my writing life like a fabulous, enchanting lover, because that is what it is to me. Something that is terribly time consuming, delicious and time-stopping. I have missed important meetings for love, and I will continue to put my writing life in the same position. My writing life is the lover at the center, not the neglected cranky demanding millstone, my ball and chain.
When you are love, truly and passionately, you don't have to write down in your daily schedule "Spend quality time with Lover today. You can't not. — Heather Sellers

You don't have to have clarity," he said, "to take a clear position. — Heather Sellers

Writing is making a mess, and then working and reworking to create a beautiful piece. — Heather Sellers

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

Trust the comfy clothes you reach for day after day, your plain, regular, essential self. — Heather Sellers