You can live your whole life in your brain and not experience what's around you. You go crazy that way. That's why I have to watch myself when I get isolated for too long.
Fiona AppleRead
I had really bad obsessive-compulsive disorder. At its worst, I was compelled to leave my house at three o'clock in the morning and go out in the alley because I just knew that the paper-towel roll I threw in the recycling bin was uncomfortable, like it was lying the wrong way, and I would be down in the garbage.
Interpretation
Fiona Apple shares her struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder, illustrating the intense and irrational thoughts that can accompany it.
In this quote, Fiona Apple candidly describes her battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), highlighting how her mind would compel her to take extreme actions, such as searching through the garbage late at night. This reflection sheds light on the overwhelming nature of OCD, where seemingly minor issues can trigger obsessive thoughts and behaviors that significantly disrupt one's life.
In practice
In a mental health awareness speech, one might illustrate this quote to discuss the challenges of OCD.
You can live your whole life in your brain and not experience what's around you. You go crazy that way. That's why I have to watch myself when I get isolated for too long.
Because for whatever reason, even though I want to stay home all the time and be left alone, I want to tell the world who I am now.
I don't want to give any advice to a 19-year-old, because I want a 19-year-old to make mistakes and learn from them. Make mistakes, make mistakes, make mistakes. Just make sure they're your mistakes.
Rape is the most humiliating thing that can be done to you; it's the most vulnerable that you can be. But once I realized that, I became a stronger person and faced all my fears.
Though dreams can be deceiving; like faces are to hearts, they serve for sweet relieving, when fantasy and reality lie too far apart.
I got into therapy in the fifth grade because I said in a sarcastic way that I was going to kill myself, and they didn't get it then. Nothing's changed.
When I look at the patients that I've cared for with mental illness, I know that many of them took years to come forward and tell somebody that they were in pain and that they needed help.
When I was coming out of depression, I made one random video. It wasn't funny or anything, but just the idea that people I didn't know were watching it made me feel less alone than I'd felt in a long time.
I had a mental breakdown while doing my Ph.D. at Cambridge, soon after I cut off contact with my parents, and I started seeing the university counsellor, one of the best decisions I ever made. There's something very nourishing in setting aside an hour a week to talk.
For me, depression is very much tied to my feeling that so much is being asked of me. I have to 'perform' rather than necessarily be myself. I have to perform a perfect Margo Jefferson, at an impossibly high level.
I guess I realize that I don't want to die. I don't want to live either, but-there really isn't anything in-between. Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst. But since the tendency toward inertia means that it's easier for me to stay alive than die, I guess that's how it's going to be, so I guess I should try to be happy.
Getting help for substance abuse can be reduced to the deceptively simple focus of βkeeping away from the dope.β But what does getting help with depression mean? Learning to keep away from your own mind?
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