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

by Sarah Wilson

We put on a smile rather than tell friends we are desperately lonely. And we make loud, verbose claims at dinner parties to make everyone certain of our certainty. We’re funny like that.

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.”

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 . . .’”

You choose. You might not even know why, but you do. You commit. Then you do the work. Oh, yeah. Then you falter. And fuck up. And go back to the beginning.

THE JOURNEY One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice— though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do— determined to save the only life you could save. — Mary Oliver

Researchers have found that folk who eat more fermented foods (which contain gut healing probiotics) have fewer symptoms of social anxiety. Another study found that eating a mere yogurt (I say “mere” because the commercial stuff contains only small amounts of the beneficial bacteria touted on the front of the tub) twice a day for a few weeks changed the makeup of the subjects’ gut microbes, and this led to the production of compounds that modified brain chemistry.

Nascent research published in Nature Neuroscience also hypothesizes that phobias (an anxious manifestation, as per the DSM) may be genetic “memories” passed down from our ancestors and mediated by epigenetics, which may help to explain why people suffer from seemingly irrational phobias that probably made sense at some point in our evolution