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

by Sarah Wilson

Sehnsucht: (noun) An intense yearning for something far-off and indefinable.

Irish poet and philosopher David Whyte. In his book The Three Marriages, Whyte says we need to navigate three vital relationships in life: one to others (“particularly and very personally, to one other living, breathing person”), another to work, and another to one’s self “through an understanding of what it means to be themselves, discrete individuals alive and seemingly separate from everyone and everything else.”

Whyte’s take is this: “Because there’s a silence and aloneness that accompanies a strong relationship with yourself. In that silence we see the truth of our existence and the shortness of life. And this is painful. “Also, when we come in close, we become larger . . . and this requires change. We become more visible, and thus more open to being touched by life, and thus more likely to be hurt.”

In 1937 Carl Jung wrote, “A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul that has not discovered its meaning.”

We yearned our way to becoming human. We yearned our way out of our mom’s womb to oxygenated life. It’s painful: we scream as we push forward into it.

The hum of the sunlight on the concrete streets, the smell of people’s emotions around me.

Here’s my (possibly) contentious idea: It’s because we’re going in the wrong direction. We’re grasping outward for satisfaction, sense of purpose, and for a solution to our unease. When we really need to be going inward, where the comfort lies.

Every man rushes elsewhere into the future because no man has arrived at himself. — Michel de Montaigne

freedom from the restlessness in our beings could only be achieved by actively resisting the pull outward and into the future, and instead learning to “stay at home.”

Home, in case Montaigne and I haven’t spelled it out well enough yet, being ourselves.

We rush to escape what makes us anxious, which makes us anxious, and so we rush some more. —cruel irony #5

Indeed since Kierkegaard (in the 1840s), the existentialists have sought to explain this particular human anxiety as the dread we feel when we realize life is finite.

If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.

Some of us have depressed anxiety. Others have anxious depression.

Adding anxiety to depression is a bit like adding cocaine to alcohol. It presses fast-forward on the whole experience.

I liken my battle with depression and anxiety to being on a see-saw. If I manage to get some level of control over my depression, my anxiety bubbles to the surface.

Depression and anxiety at the same time is being sucked into a hole, in the dark, but with all your nightmares chasing you, so you run around and around the bottom of the hole but never get away from anything. — Lisa Jane

It’s sort of like one side of your brain begging you not to get out of bed with chains, meanwhile the other part of you barks like a military sergeant for not getting out of bed. — Joy

“Ask yourself what ‘problem’ you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment?”

He asks you to try it right now with a problem. Try it with a bit of your particular brand of anxious buzz as you read this. Feel into the problem now; not in sixty seconds, not in two seconds. Now! Your head might jump fifteen minutes ahead. No. Now. Is the problem still there? Nope. It’s gone, right?

Real disasters are a cinch compared to the shit we make up in our heads. Actually, they’re a relief.

In my lifetime, I’ve grasped outward to many things . . . To sugar and coffee.

We’re actually programmed to hunt it down—to grasp and grasp for it. Why? Because it’s such a marvelous and instant source of fat (which our ancestors 10,000 years ago found helpful).

The stuff is also addictive and we have no “off/full switch” for it in our brains (as we do for all other food molecules), so we keep going back for more and more.

To alcohol.

To new cities.

I’m always fleeing.

“You need to get heavy.”

To the Hare Krishnas.

To destructive partners.

To obsessions and compulsions.

To the ping of an incoming email.

Weekend Panic is when you think you should be doing bigger things, farther out of town, all perfectly planned ahead.

idealized downtime.

In Paris a little while back I noticed the locals don’t walk around shops on a Sunday afternoon and buy stuff they don’t need. Hyper-consumerism is deemed vulgar. Instead, they walk the streets merely to . . . wander and ponder. They call it a flânerie—a wandering walk. I once found a secondhand book with the cover ripped off called The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, by Edmund White. To stroll in this way, White explained, is to be in real time with a city.

They visit gardens and poke their heads into avenues and parks and galleries. Just to absorb and look and reflect. It’s a big part of the French psyche this simple observation of, and reflection upon, humanity. I love the spirit of it—sitting facing out to life. Then wandering among it.

When there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, we settle in close to ourselves.

“Sez, I’m checking in with my Inside People,”

He explained this entailed just sitting and asking of one’s people, “Are we all happy? Comfortable? Heading in good directions?” We chatted about who these “people” were.

that side of ourselves we go home to after a bewildering day, or a loud night? The self we can see in our eyes looking in the mirror as we brush our teeth; the s...

“Are we good? Are we comfortable? Is this where we should be? Is it making sense?”

“Don’t think or plan in this space, just check in,”

Then let stuff happen. It just does, “without trying,” he tells me. In his case, a thriving business happened to him. Literally. It di...

it’s also important to listen to what your peeps tell you when you a...

for me, the answer that I hear is invariably, “Better than we thought, actually.” Inside peeps are like t...

referred to as “intellectual anxiety attacks” (what I call anxiety spirals). These spirals are head-y. To the external observer I may look perfectly normal, but inside I’m a whirly-whirly of thoughts and nervousness. I’m not unaware of what’s going on. Quite the opposite, I’m hyperaware.

In intellectual anxiety attacks (one of my spirals) we do the fight-or-flight response while simultaneously being able to understand what it’s about.

The more banal the supposed trigger, the guiltier and more self-indulgent and pathetic we feel, thus adding to the anxious spiral. —cruel irony #6

The anxious tend to seek solitude, yet we simultaneously crave connection. — cruel irony #7

We need easy-going people, but they can be our undoing. —cruel irony #8