I’m having a video call with my daughter and trying to get the dogs into the car following our walk. Precariously holding the phone between my chin and shoulder I’m trying to make sure I have both the leads and my rucksack.
My daughter is walking to the supermarket to buy milk. She’s been struggling with anxiety recently and even making a short journey is feeling overwhelming. I’m trying to offer support without pouring the dog’s water all over my trousers.
‘Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole journey that way.’
This is E.L. Doctorow conveying a truth about life never mind writing. None of us ever knows what’s coming next, but it still frequently depletes us and leaves us paralysed by an anxiety that promises trouble ahead.
Aside from my daughter’s current battles, disparate parts of life have recently been making me think about anxiety and the way it can be self-generated.
Reading ‘Meditations’ by Marcus Aurelius for the Peak Notions book club, I was particularly struck by this sentence,
‘So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.’
The former Roman Emporer appears to have summed up the most effective way to address anxiety from two millennia away.
When we are anxious, we focus all of our attention on trying to ensure the thing we fear doesn’t happen rather than reminding ourselves of all the times in the past we have experienced and survived similar or worse situations.
The other reminder I had of the randomness and associated shame of anxiety came when I visited a friend I hadn’t seen for two years.
As time has passed I’ve found it increasingly difficult and anxiety-inducing to contact him and arrange a meeting.
This is not dissimilar to the decade I spent living next door to someone who I never introduced myself to and then, for reasons I still can’t fathom, took to randomly guessing his name in a note I put through his door to complain about an annoying answering machine that beeped throughout a week when he was away.
‘Who is Julian?’ he asked, not unreasonably, on his return. ‘My name’s John.’
I was pleased to have got the initial right.
The problem with this kind of anxiety is that it is self-generated. I recognise what I am doing to myself by not contacting my friend or failing to ask the name of my neighbour and then having to guess it, but I still put myself through it.
Our propensity to create anxiety for ourselves doesn’t stop there.
One of the most challenging aspects of anxiety is that getting it under control is almost entirely counterintuitive.
Stepping into anxiety and tolerating the discomfort ultimately leads to liberation, but anxiety swears blind that avoiding driving down those narrow country lanes to one of my favourite locations for a dog walk is the best strategy because, if I don’t, it’s inevitable I’ll be crushed under the wheels of a speeding combine-harvester.
So the more we avoid what makes us feel anxious, the stronger our anxiety becomes and the more responsibility we have to assume for having let it get there.
Certainty has a lot to answer for too.
We all like to have a sense of certainty in our lives and often rely on it to feel secure but it’s just another way to create anxiety because certainty doesn’t exist. There isn’t any. None.
In our futile pursuit of a reliable future, shored up as it is with diary entries and plans with friends for months in advance, we lull ourselves into the unhelpful belief that anything can be guaranteed when, in fact, an open acceptance that I may not even make it to the end of this sentence is, paradoxically, one of the best ways to ensure I get there without angst.
Then there’s the fanciful idea that any of us lives without anxiety.
By perpetuating the lie that anxiety is only experienced by the afflicted few we make it feel much worse than it is which, in turn, makes us more anxious.
Feeling nervous about making a presentation in front of people is proportionate and human. Feeling so terrified that you have a panic attack and faint in the toilet is not, but they’re both anxiety.
So the best way to deal with anxiety is not to push it away but to do your best to accept it, as hard as it is.
Elizabeth Gilbert writes a letter to fear in her book ‘Big Magic’. In it, she imagines going on a road trip and being forced to take fear with her but making it clear that, while she can always have her voice, she will not be permitted to drive.
I like this metaphor because it underlines the folly of trying to push anxiety aside and cut it off, a strategy that serves only to ensure it will grab the wheel.
Avoidance is an excellent way to perpetuate and strengthen your anxiety, so it’s important to avoid avoiding things too.
Some years ago, I went through a lengthy period of avoiding social activity with a particular emphasis on events I’d bought tickets to.
It became so ridiculous at its peak that I would be in the middle of purchasing the seats for a gig or show whilst simultaneously thinking to myself, ‘It’s a shame I won’t see this. It’ll probably be great.’
Every time I did it, I made the likelihood of doing it again stronger. All I needed to do was show up to something I’d paid to show up to, and the spell would have been, if not broken, substantially depleted.
This sort of tomfoolery tends to diminish self-compassion because buying tickets for events you have no intention of attending makes you feel like a freak and being a freak also makes anxiety worse.
If you’re engaged in a constant tirade of abuse at yourself for your wasteful idiocy and pathetic weakness your subtext is ‘It’s not OK to be me’ and if that’s not a direct route to existential anxiety, I don’t know what is.
When I started to do things I’d planned to do I found that the gratitude I felt for the opportunities I had was a good way of mitigating the feeling of anxiety making life smaller.
As I’m driving home after finishing my conversation with my daughter, I begin to worry that I’ve left one of the dogs in the car park.
I look in the rearview mirror but only one of them is visible, and the more I think about the possibility of making such a terrible error the more I can feel the anxiety building but I know it’s a fog of my own making.
The big conceit is the blame we apportion to the outside world for our anxieties when it’s within us that the fire is started and fueled.
An unwillingness to accept ourselves, an ignorance of what we need, and our points of difference to those we consider ‘normal’ is often the root of anxiety.
As my ‘missing’ dog lifts her head above the rear seats and slobbers on the headrest I am reminded of the Oscar Wilde quote, ‘Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken,’ and I can almost immediately feel the fog lift.
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