Andrew Solomon Quote

There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.

Andrew Solomon

There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.

Tags: depression

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About Andrew Solomon

Andrew Solomon (born October 30, 1963) is an American writer on politics, culture and psychology, who lives in New York City and London. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Travel and Leisure, and other publications on a range of subjects, including depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and Deaf politics.
Solomon's book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, and was included in The Times list of one hundred best books of the decade. Honors awarded to Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity include the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Media for a Just Society Award of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Wellcome Book Prize.
Solomon is a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center, a lecturer at Yale School of Medicine, and a past President of PEN American Center.