Natalie Maines Quotes

I'm pretty good at remaining calm during an emergency. My house burned down when I was 12, which made me really pragmatic about what needed to be done. But I can be bad in that I compartmentalize a lot of emotions and push them away to deal with them at a later date.

When I've had a meltdown, people will say to me, "Well, you failed to keep your sense of humor."

When I'm photographing, I think - like any rescue worker who deals with tragedy - you have to have some protective barrier around your heart so you can do your job. You tend to have a delayed reaction to things. I feel things more deeply after I put the camera down.

I think we all have mechanisms that we use, each of us individually, to deal with pain that we've had or just dealing with life or whatever. Everyone's story is different, but we all have some kind of mechanism that we use to deal with stuff, that we create pretty young.

My parents passed away when I was a teenager, so I had to learn different survival techniques, I think, in comedy. You know, using comedy as a pressure release, as a release valve in life really kept my sanity.

If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.

It seems nobody really talks about what we do with our emotional pain. Only the ascendant perhaps, who have learned how to fully meditate or do yoga or whatever through their emotional pain.

Logic doesn't stop you feeling. You can behave logically and it can hurt like hell. Or it can comfort you. Or release you. Or all at the same time

My natural response to a stressful situation is to shut down. I do weird things, like, I don't cry, I get really cold.

Once you just tell yourself, 'OK, I'm going to have a breakdown right now, and I'm going to cry for an hour, put my phone away. I'm going to go swimming, and then I'm gonna make my family dinner and lay on the couch and watch 'Ru Paul's Drag Race,'' once you accept that it's not the day and you can just have a breakdown, you're over it.

I got problems. I freak out, go to a shrink, go through all kinds of therapy and stuff, but I'm learning how to deal with it. That's why I've chosen one hour a night to get all of my aggressions out. to really tell the world the way I feel.

Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.

I was a very sensitive kid who then had to condition myself to desensitize.

I guess they're tough jokes. But there's lots of things you either laugh or cry at. And you just can't cry.

I can't stay mad very long. I get grumpy when I read a bad review. I say, 'How could he say that about my music?' Then I forget about it. If I got mad every time somebody wrote something negative about me, I'd be exploding all the time. I'd be burned out just from reading reviews.

I call my therapist every other day. It's not a one-stop shop. You have to push away all that negativity in your head. Face it, name it, let it go.

Across the Atlantic, commercial therapy of all kinds provides so many more comfortable outlets for people when they are under pressure. The English tradition is to get a grip, whereas the American version is to get in touch with your feelings, to say: 'I'm a good person. Isn't it terrible when bad things happen to people like me?'

I tend to process emotional stuff very, very slowly.

Some days, 24 hours is too much to stay put in, so I take the day hour by hour, moment by moment. I break the task, the challenge, the fear into small, bite-size pieces. I can handle a piece of fear, depression, anger, pain, sadness, loneliness, illness. I actually put my hands up to my face, one next to each eye, like blinders on a horse.

I learned certain exercises to help me cope, to get myself in tip-top mental shape to deal with auditions and rejection.

What do you do when your world is falling apart? How do you hold onto the real and the rational? I think that's very relatable for people.

My mood depends on how I treat my toothbrushes. Being a skipper is a strenuous job, and when you are going through a rough phase, obviously you start taking out your frustration. You can't take it out on anyone: you can't take it out on your teammates or your wife. The only person that is left is your toothbrush.

I've been one of those people that hold on to a little bit more stress than others. People take certain situations a little bit differently.

If you're out there and things are going badly, are you going to cry or break down?

My mom was funny and nutty. I suppose she had to be to survive raising 10 kids. To cope and keep a cap on things, she kept us buoyant and harmonious. She wouldn't let us express anger, which later on landed me in therapy but also made it easier for me to play laid-back, measured roles.