Michelle MacLaren Quotes

I was a very anxious kid. I was bullied at primary school and responded by making myself as anonymous as possible at secondary school.

I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.

For some men, life seems to be one long attempt to escape childhood and all the fears of childhood. That's what many of us are doing.

I had trained myself not to go to the bathroom throughout my elementary and junior high school years because I was bullied. And you don't understand why you're being bullied, so you just suppress it.

There are so many things we are afraid of, thinking that if we confront them, they will kill us. Most of it goes back to your infancy.

When you lose a parent at ten years old, the world seems like a much scarier place. It makes complete sense to me that I took survival courses when I was a teenager and started going to war zones as a reporter. I didn't ever want to be taken advantage of, and I wanted to be able to take care of those around me.

When I was a kid, I had two nightmares: one was nuclear war, and the other was that my parents would get a divorce; and when I was twenty, they split up, and I just felt like I needed to confront all those things that scared me as a kid - entering young adulthood and trying to have relationships.

(What are your ghosts like?) (They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.) (This is also where my ghosts reside.) (You have ghosts?) (Of course I have ghosts.) (But you are a child.) (I am not a child.) (But you have not known love.) (These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)

What I remember the most about my childhood is constant fear and "good food." I don't want to get into the greasy, buttery, deep-fried, fatty, sugary, meaty, barbecued details here, but with no knowledge of healthy lifestyles or positive psychology, time took its toll on me.

I'm a woman who carries around all these layers of fear and vulnerability.

I used to think that what scared me was the idea of being abandoned until someone said to me, 'Only children can be abandoned. Adults can't be abandoned because we have a choice. Children don't have a choice.'

Fear is a terrible thing. It makes you do awful things.

I was badly bullied when I was in the seventh grade - relentlessly, mercilessly - by a group of 12-year-old girls. And it left me with a determination that no matter what, I had to throw my shoulders back, stick out my chin, and project a sense that no one and nothing could hurt me. That turned out to be a life-changing mistake.

If someone really wants to hurt you, they'll find a way whatever. I don't want to live my life worrying about it.

I have irrational fears, and they all go back to losing my father as a kid. I've never gotten over it.

People struggle with moments of deep dread about life and moments of surety. Often within the course of the same day. Life is a roller coaster, especially if you take risks.

Nightmares are releases.

I cried every day of first grade. In class. Which meant I ended up getting comfortable emoting in a place where it wasn't the norm.

Even at age 10, I already knew that I was different from most people. My anxiety disorder was still years from being diagnosed, but it affected me quite deeply. I was too afraid to speak out in class, too nervous to make real friends.

The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea.

The way that people feel changes everything. Feelings are forces. They cause us to time travel. And to leave ourselves, to leave our bodies. I would be that kind of psychologist who says, 'You're absolutely right - there are monsters under the bed.'

I never really got nightmares from movies. In fact, I recall my father saying when I was three years old that I would be scared, but I never was.

My first fear was about the devil, when I was around fire, something I saw in a movie. I think it's about pain, in whichever form it comes. I had a lot of energy as a child - sometimes too much - and I didn't know how to channel it. It was making me suffer. It was bigger than myself, and I was very young.

The fact is that trauma and risk taking hadn't become scarier over the years; it had become more normal.

I had massive anxiety as a child. I was in therapy. From 8 to 10, I was borderline agora-phobic. I could not leave my mom's side. I don't really have panic attacks anymore, but I had really bad anxiety.