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

by Sarah Wilson

There’s no certainty. No control. You can’t force or micromanage sleep. Attempts to do so only push sleep further into the abyss.

I don’t know myself in those moments. I don’t know why I can’t stop the spiral. I’m smart enough to know better. But. It’s almost like a short circuit occurs. Something very primal switches into gear.

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

We cope with strangers better than our own mates when we’re anxious. — cruel irony #9

We may come across as extroverted, but we have social anxiety. — cruel irony #10

We can talk coherently and rationally about our anxiety, even joke about it, yet we freak out on a regular basis. — cruel irony #11

We seem doggedly set in our ways, but we have no idea what we want. — cruel irony #12

We look strong and controlling. But we actually need others’ help more than most. — cruel irony #13

We’re always thinking about everyone (and everything), but we’re so damn selfish. — cruel irony #14

I need you to reach out to me, even when I’m so anxious I’ve stopped leaving the house. I need to know someone still cares and wants to see me.

stop and ask, “What’s the problem?

I absolutely believe it helps to see anxiety as having a metapurpose beyond the arbitrary torture of our little souls. Pain is lessened when there is a point to it.

As Nietzsche said, “He who has a why can endure any how.”

“Help us manage our fire, yes, but don’t try to extinguish us.”

Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings

“To be anxious wasn’t shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be . . . more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be the person who saw with sharper eyes and felt with more active skin.”

“The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.”

I told her I look back now and can see that every major step forward in my career has been driven by my anxiety. 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. I think anxiety pushes us. It exists to do so—it helps us friggin’ fire up. Even when it makes us stall with terror, it eventually makes conditions so unbearable that we ricochet off to a new important direction. Eventually.

I’ve been able to rebuild and redefine my life several times because I’ve had nothing to lose.

Tiger Woods once declared, “The day I’m not nervous is the day I quit. To me, nerves are great. That means you care.”

In other words, it’s easier to convince yourself to be excited than to bloody well just relax when you’re anxious.

They can spot a dickhead. Their heightened threat radar means they’re selective about who they befriend. If you’re one of their mates, you can rest easy knowing you’re not a dickhead.

They give a shit. About everything.

Anxiety is painful. There’s nothing quite like it. It’s extremely private and lonely and it comes with the overwhelming sense that no one on the planet could possibly relate to the intensity and the sharpness. The whirling thoughts are so uniquely you, in a “stale bedsheets smell after a bout of the flu” kind of way. It’s every thought you ever had, all at once. No one could ever understand so many thoughts. Which is why when someone asks me, “What’s going on? What are you anxious about?” there is no way to explain.

Frankl maintained that finding the meaning of life is our ultimate purpose and suffering brings us to this purpose.

Australian social researcher and author of The Good Life Hugh Mackay is a vocal opponent of the pursuit of happiness as a life strategy. 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.

it’s a responsibility to do the hard work if you’re someone whose anxiety ignites regularly.

Simply show up. Start. Things will flow.

I, too, take way longer than most people to do pretty much anything that matters to me.

Ira Glass on This American Life

the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work . . . It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

Sometimes, though, when I put in the work, my anxiety has seen love grow, not die. And so, anxiety can be the very thing that pushes us to become our best person. When worked through, dug through, sat through, anxiety can get us vulnerable and raw and open. And oh so real.

My self-destructive inclination when anxious has been to distance myself from the world. I’m really very good at extracting myself from those around me and hiding out until I think I’m a more bearable person to be around.

I’ve trained myself to tell partners and close friends and even relative strangers about my “stuff.” At the time it’s like standing naked in gale-force sleet.

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.

I end up so frozen that it’s easier to keep going (even past breaking point) than it is to make a decision to change something.—

Anxiety is the dizzying effect of freedom, of boundless possibility,

I studied German philosopher Martin Heidegger for six months during my bipolar period in my twenties. He saw anxiety as the awareness of the “impossibility of our possibilities.”

If we drill down a bit we can see that this happens because we work to the belief there’s a perfect decision out there to be made. But such a thing doesn’t exist. And clutching at something that doesn’t exist is enough to send anyone into a drowning panic. We can never find the best option. Anxiety is what occurs when we realize this, when we realize that we are not the captains of our own ships.

I convince myself that controlling my life and aiming for perfection will cocoon me from anxiety. But it only causes more of the dreaded thing. — cruel irony #15

We all just need to back the fuck off.

Anxiety is like having new tabs opening very quickly [on your computer] one after another and not being able to close them or stop new ones from opening—but in your head.

It’s only in the nothingness that we can see the somethingness.

Let’s take a look at how Modern Life goes. Mostly, it’s frenetic and at a pace that’s not conducive to reflective thought.

I know there’s a generation of us who relish air travel because it’s a rare chunk of time when we have a “gap”—we can’t be contacted, the inbox influx abates and if we do take the opportunity to get through emails, we have time to edit them before they send. Lovely languid luxury, I tell you! But airlines are now phasing in Wi-Fi on planes.

Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries. — cruel irony #16

Richard Gilpin writes in Mindfulness for Unravelling Anxiety

In the past, success was gauged by how well you could hunt down information, collate data, find a great reference in the World Book Encyclopedia. Now, success must be gauged by how much information and data you can shut out . . . via your own boundaries.

“Our dear Sarah, stop asking why,” he said. “You have learned all the knowledge, you have enough knowledge. And no answer comes, yes? You have to sit.”