Her manner of dress, of speech, of doing her hair, of spending her time, had not changed since it first became apparent to a far younger Morgen that in all her life to come no one was, in all probability, going to care in the slightest how she looked, or what she did, and the minor wrench of leaving humanity behind was more than compensated for by her complacent freedom from a thousand small irritations.

"I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking." She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried,” she said, “was because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all.

We never really cared about all the things that other people cared about, you know? Like, people recognizing me on the street never interested me. I've always been kind of suspicious of the world, anyway, so it's pretty easy for me to live in my own little world.

She didn’t care. Not caring was how she got through the day.

Liv worried less about how important other people thought she was and more about things that really mattered.

Why couldn't she stop talking? Did all lonely people have that problem?

I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared. And it was after that that I found out the truth. I learnt the truth last November — on the third of November, to be precise — and I remember every instant since.

As a teenager, I told everybody that I didn't care about anything, when the truth was I cared about way too much. Other people ruled my world without my even knowing. I thought happiness was a destiny not choice. I thought love was something that just happened, not something you worked for.

I’m not important. Everyone will do just fine without me,” I say.
“Who cares about everyone? What about me?

It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend — about what, I don’t recall — and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person’s eyes.

Nobody ever listened to me and I used to think that was their fault. Eventually I got to realise maybe it was the fact I was boring and paranoid that was the problem. But you find that people who know you rarely listen to a word you say, even though they'll happily take as gospel the word of a man they've never met if it's on a record or in a book. If you want to say something and have people listen then you have to wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to live a lie.

...we all must admit that everything is fine and there's no need in the world to worry, and in fact we should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we're not REALLY worried about ANYTHING.

I didn’t really listen to what people were saying or worried what they thought of me but I did get judged

I think there's an anxiety in life when we automatically tend to look to the next thing or we're complaining about the past; like somebody recently said to me, 'Well, is your show going to get picked up? Aren't you concerned about that?' I said, 'I don't care. I don't want to worry about that because worrying is not going to make it happen or not happen.' I want to trust that if it does, then that's what's supposed to happen and if it doesn't get picked up, then that's okay, too. It's just a more peaceful way to live.