First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

by Sarah Wilson

THE WORM’S WAKING This is how a human being can change: There is a worm addicted to eating grape leaves. Suddenly, he wakes up, call it grace, whatever, something wakes him, and he is no longer a worm. He is the entire vineyard, and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks, a growing wisdom and joy that does not need to devour. — Rumi

“How do I get my mind to shut up?”

If I sit in a cave for a year on mountain, then maybe I do it. But no guarantee.” He waves his hand. “Anyway, I don’t have time.”

He’d given me a response that came with a screaming, cap-lettered subtext: YOU’RE OKAY AS YOU ARE!!!

Now, a strange thing happens when you realize that some gargantuan, all-looming issue you’d been fretting over no longer needs to be fixed. You take a deep, free breath, expand a little, release your grip and get on with better things.

you might be reading these words here because you’re a fretter with a mind that goes too fast, too high, too unbridled.

I’ve come to believe that the fretting itself can be the very thing that plonks you on the path to a great life.

The ordeal had instead triggered a panic, an overwhelming and lonely panic of the most fundamental kind.

Stephen Fry wrote in The Fry Chronicles that behind “the mask of security, ease, confidence and assurance I wear (so easily that its features often lift into a smirk that looks like complacency and smugness) [is] the real condition of anxiety, self-doubt, self-disgust and fear in which much of my life then and now is lived.”

philosopher Alain de Botton’s The Book of Life: “We must suffer alone. But we can at least hold out our arms to our similarly tortured, fractured, and above all else, anxious neighbors, as if to say, in the kindest way possible: ‘I know . .

When you realize there’s no guidebook, an opportunity suddenly presents itself. If no one knows what they’re doing, if there’s no “right” way to do life, then we can surely choose our own way.

That’s the thing with my important life moments, they always seem to emerge slowly, like a Polaroid picture. I suspect few people have instant-capture aha moments. Especially those of us ensconced in the nebulous realm of anxiety where discernible lines between normal and neurotic cease, at some point, to exist.

I think all the diagnoses boil down to anxiety. That is, an itchy sense that things are not right, a buzzing dis-ease.

Do you think it might be lovelier if we bundle up our uncertainty, fear, late-night overthinking and kooky coping habits, tuck them gently under our arm, and see where they take us?

We’re told that globally one in thirteen people suffer an anxiety-related illness.

Some studies tell us that one in six of us in the West will be afflicted with an anxiety disorder at some stage in our lives, making it the most common officially classified mental illness.

For men, anxiety is even more common than depression—one in five men will experien...

these are only the stats for those whose anxiety crosses the line to becom...

Anxiety was first classified as a mental disorder in 1980 in the third edition of the DSM.

In 1950 only two books had been written on the topic. Two. In the whole entire world. (Freud wrote about it eighty years ago in The Problem of Anxiety, and Søren Kierkegaard ninety years before him in The Concept of Anxiety.)

More recently, it’s been found that another neurotransmitter, anandamide (a name that comes from the Sanskrit word ananda for joy or bliss), helps our brain communicate happiness, ease and comfort.

When the balance of “good” and “bad” bacteria is out of whack (dysbiosis, caused by such things as poor diet, medications, antibiotics, allergens, parasites, fungal overgrowth), it can trigger a cascade of inflammatory molecular reactions that feed back to the central nervous system, causing inflammation in the brain. And it’s this inflammation that messes with our neurotransmitters, leading to anxiety. Put simply, if you have fire in the gut, you have fire in the brain.

Nascent

we are not our anxiety or depression. No, we are the sky, and anxiety and depression are but clouds that pass through us.

For some of us, it does get to the point where the bloody clouds take over the sky. There is nothing left but black clouds. It becomes medical.

Take on board all the theories. But given no definitive causes, diagnoses or treatments have been found yet, why not see this as an opportunity? An opportunity to define anxiety as something other than a problem or disorder that has to be fixed as such. U.K. Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman, who dedicates his column inches to questioning self-help culture, asks whether our focusing so heavily on defining the problem tacitly creates the problem, namely that we’re broken and require fixing. “Perhaps the problem, sometimes, is the notion that there’s a problem.”

I must emphasize: learn, learn, learn. And be open to it all. This is pretty much the raison d’être, the joy of this journey.

Dr. Mark Cross agrees: “Just because you’re diagnosed with anxiety, doesn’t mean you have a problem...

So, I ask, could we go our own way? Could we play a little with not having a prob...

a diagnosis can be a safe place to plant things until you have the wisdom and learning to take you into deeper understanding. Nicely, the word diagnosis itself comes from the Greek diagnosi, which means “to know through.”

The curious nature of anxiety is such that it defies its own diagnosis and treatment — cruel irony #1

We suck it up when we feel anxious and soldier on until, well, we tip over the edge and our anxiety turns pathological and medical. Flipside, depressed behavior—slovenliness, unproductiveness and suck-holey gloom—is something we abhor. Thusly, depression is an issue. And, thusly, we have lots of structures in place to identify it and treat it.

Depression is stigmatized, anxiety is sanctified as propping up modern life,

It’s a self-perpetuating pain—we use anxiety to fight our anxiety.

Clusterfuck is a military term from the 1960s. It refers to a chaotic, complex situation where everything seems to go wrong.

The more anxious we are, the more high-functioning we will make ourselves appear, which just encourages the world to lean on us more. — cruel irony #2

Insomnia is anxiety’s spiteful bedfellow. Anxious people desperately need sleep, yet their condition ensures they are denied it.

Thinking about insomnia this way has helped things a lot. Rather than feeling I have a hopeless, helpless affliction, I can see I just need to find a way to feel held. To feel that everything fits. That everything is going to be okay. That life has this one, my little friend.

Insomnia is a cry from our core to spend reflective time with ourselves.

British philosopher Alain de Botton puts it, “It’s an inarticulate, maddening but ultimately healthy plea released by our core self that we confront the issues we’ve put off for too long. Insomnia isn’t really to do with not being able to sleep; it’s about not having given ourselves a chance to think.”

this need to reflect quietly (to reacquaint our selves with ourselves), without the distraction and obligations of our daylight selves, outweighs the benefits of sleep and so ...

I point out this nexus—between my spiritual yearning and anxiety—because it’s helped me understand my restlessness ever since. Anxiety and existential curiosity are connected. Yes, absolutely, it can become medical when it spirals out too far. But its origins are far more fundamental.

This little nattering self is your little “i.” You (the big “I”) can watch it all.

And you hang out a bit more, calmly and patiently. And then it might occur to you that your little mate “i” is just that—a little mate sitting next to you. And that this Big “I” is who you really are. It feels deep and close and yet so vast. I find this realization funny when it strikes. Here “I” am. And, yet, for so long I thought I was merely my little nattering mate sitting next to me. It’s funny in the way that a kid finds it softly, self-consciously funny when they realize their dad has played a trick on them. A dawning funny. I realize in this moment that I have been here all along.

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle?

Anxiety is a disconnection with this Something Else. As I say, the doctors and scientists can call it all kinds of things, but I believe it all comes down to this disconnect.

German psychiatrist Karl Jaspers wrote, anxiety is a feeling that you’ve “not finished something . . . that one has to look for something or . . . come into the clear about something.”

unlike a table or garlic crusher or whatever, which has a comfortingly obvious purpose, w...

It’s this lack of connection and clarity that leaves us fretting and checking and spinning around in our heads and needing to compensate with irrational, painful behaviors, whether it be OCD, phobias or panic attacks. It’s this sense of missing . . . something . . . that leaves us feeling lonely and incomplete and fluttery. Something is not right. We haven’t landed.

You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day.