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

by Sarah Wilson

“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 . . .’”

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

Insomnia isn’t really to do with not being able to sleep; it’s about not having given ourselves a chance to think.”

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.

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.

“You don’t delete a bad habit, you build a new, better one. You feed this new habit, over and over,” he tells me. He draws a new line, this time parallel to the first clump of lines, and thickens it with more and more strokes of his pen. The new thoughts clump, layer by layer, and eventually create a habit that is stronger than the old one. You build habits that trigger the comfort system, instead of the threat system.

It wasn’t about changing myself. It was about creating ease and gentleness around who I was, which allowed me to make better choices.

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.

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

Loved ones might try to pull me back from the brink, but if their attempts are in any way hesitant, or ill-conceived, or cautiously presented to me (which they often are, understandably), I’ll resist. Their hesitation in the face of my frantic thrust outward only reinforces my need to stay in control.

But instead of viewing these symptoms as quite an understandable biological response that occurs in our brains, we anxious kids can tend to interpret them as evidence that there is in fact something dire and catastrophic and entirely threatening going on.

It was suggested that the anxious chimps were pivotal for survival. Outsiders, they were the ones who were sleeping in the trees on the edge, on the border, on the boundary of the community. Hypersensitive and vigilant, the smallest noise freaked them out and disturbed them so they were awake much of the night anyway. We label such symptoms anxiety, but back when we were in trees, they were the early warning system for the troop.

Emily Dickinson’s phobias left her housebound after the age of forty, which in turn left her quite a bit of undistracted time and space to write. Ditto Charles Darwin for several decades.

follow Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings blog. It alerted me to notorious fretter Anaïs Nin’s diary notes about the importance of allowing her intensity to overflow as it needs to. “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”

I have to do dangerous, reckless things occasionally. I call it “putting a bomb under the situation.”

It leads me. It’s my internal traffic light system that tells me “go” and “stop.” When I feel the anxious choke at my throat, that urghhhh, I know something is not for me. Stop! it screams at me. In this way my relentless anxiety—and my awareness of it—has helped me make big important decisions along the way.

Glennon Doyle Melton has a slightly different take. She goes on and off antidepressants because she needs the desperation of depression to fuel her creativity. On medication she says she loses the feeling “if I don’t write I will die.

Of course, when we’re anxious we’re mostly told to calm down, to turn the dial down, to . . . just relax!!!! Are you like me and find this possibly the least helpful advice ever? (As I Instagram-memed once, “Never in the history of calming down has anyone calmed down from someone telling them to calm down.”)

The pain of anxiety is also unique in that there seems to be no mechanism for its satiation built into our collective experience.

Worry is our default position.

The purpose of life is to suffer well. By which he meant to go down into pain, own it, and not run from it. To sit in it. And in the process find meaning.

The pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness . . . I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness.” Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.

When we’re in anxiety, particularly an anxiety spiral or panic attack, we must focus on coping. Once it’s abated, though, that’s when we have to do the work. We have to ask the questions. Plus, we have to build the resilience and courage and muscle with a whole lot of little right moves to ward off further fires.

Being vulnerable is the greatest gift you can give a loved one. Brené Brown tells us this. Being vulnerable is saying “I love you” first, it’s doing something where there are no guarantees. It’s being willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. And it’s staying to tell your truth. When you do, it provides a glorious space for a loved one—or a potential loved one—to step in and be their best person.

Having your fight-or-flight response permanently switched to “on” triggers a whole stack of cortisol to circulate in your body which, among other things, down-regulates your digestive and reproductive systems.

A study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that a diet consisting of vegetables, fruit, meat, fish and whole grains correlated with less anxiety.

When we see this limitlessness, we must also face, well, that it all ends soon enough in death, and that everything is pointless. The very real risk and probability of abandonment, aloneness, and being rejected and unloved are all wrapped up in this awareness. The everythingness and nothingness all at once.