First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A new story about anxiety

by Sarah Wilson

you might have tried everything to fix this fretting, because fretters try really, really hard at everything. They also tend to think they need fixing.

Am I really mentally ill? Disordered? Defective? Or am I just weak of character and just not trying hard enough? Does taking medication alter who I am? Am I less authentic for it? Is it ‘unnatural’? And am I clinging to the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory because it absolves me of blame and the science-y-ness promises a neat fix?

No technique has been established that can determine the line in the sand where normal stress and fear becomes neurotic anxiety, or at what point your whirring thoughts can be explained as a chemical flaw in the brain instead of a character flaw (the former, of course, being far more ‘forgivable’ and, of course, ‘fixable’).

Many of us with anxiety don’t look like we’ve got a problem because outwardly we function ludicrously well. Or so the merry story goes. Our anxiety sees us make industrious lists and plans, run purposefully from one thing to the next, and move fast up stairs and across traffic intersections. We are a picture of efficiency and energy, always on the move, always doing.

We’re Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh, always flitting about convinced everyone depends on us to make things happen and to be there when they do. And to generally attend to happenings.

‘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.

And while I’m adding caveats, I’ll also advise against hardcore exercise if you’re anxious. Gentle and slow stuff is best. So. Just walk.

Handwriting is great, too. I handwrite a lot. Sometimes just to calm my anxiety. It slows things down and forces me to connect with my thoughts, the discerning ones.

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

But it also hits me in that moment that no matter which way you head, there’s always anxiety. We have an original anxiety that stems from feeling we’re missing something, that there’s more to life, that we need to know where and how we connect with life. But to sit with our true selves causes another anxiety, a lonely, exposed anxiety. Then, if we flee this sitting with ourselves, we encounter the anxiety of, well, knowing that we’re fleeing ourselves and truth. It’s a quandary; an anxious riddle, as Freud referred to it. I guess we have to ask ourselves, which anxiety is the worse?

But I now allow myself to fly for a bit – because my highs can be a lot of positive, creative and constructive fun. They’re also inherently me. I have, and always will have, an insatiable need for connection.

This is the hoary deal – when you have a mood disorder, few people are heavy enough and patient enough to anchor your ups and downs.

Yep, anxiety can just be in your bones. No reason required.

If anxiety surges forward, depression is a clinging to the past.

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

Real disasters are a cinch compared to the shit we make up in our heads.

When I get Weekend Panic, I’ll walk to a bookshop, browse, walk home. I’ll wander around a bit on the way home. I set my aims super low. My aim is simply to look at a few things, see what happens. You know, to enjoy staying close.

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 hyper-aware.

Describing myself as a 'whirly-whirly of thoughts' is now going to be my new favourite thing

I work to black and white versus colour. If something appears in my mind’s eye in black and white, it signals I’m being too rigid. I think anxious people tend to do this because when we’re in anxiety it’s very hard to access our intuition. For years I’d be told to ‘trust your gut’ and ‘go with what you feel’. But when you’re in anxiety – particularly in an anxious spiral – you’re all head. Blood rushes from your internals, powering the thoughts, disconnecting you from your gut.

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. Everything tells me I. Must. Stop. The. Thoughts.

When I’m anxious every part of me wants to extract myself from other humans.

But the irony is, few things fuel my anxiety like being left alone with the buzz.

Plus, it’s a job I have to attend to. I rise to the challenge. Like a chef I put on an apron, removing it once the shift is over. But if it’s an everyday human experience that you’re ‘meant’ to enjoy, like a party, Lord help me.

I truly hate this about my anxiety. It can make me so terribly self-absorbed. I forget birthdays or don’t have the energy or creativity to buy a present. And, yet, I wish I could explain that in my anxious moments I actually care more about the welfare of others than myself.

Don’t confuse our need to control our environment with a need to control you.

But again, it’s a fine line between flying and choking from anxiety, between being a hero and a coward.

The whirling thoughts are so uniquely you, in a ‘stale bed-sheets 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.

‘Happiness is generally impossible for longer than fifteen minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.’

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.

I point out that keeping our bowl steady is a responsibility. We must work at it. We must vigilantly build our stability so that we can carry our full bowl without sloshing all over ourselves and, perhaps more importantly, our loved ones.

More choice is meant to bring us more freedom (so says capitalism). And yet we’re happier when we’re bound.

We must drop certainty anchors. And I’m putting this in the imperative tense so that it’s one less decision you have to make. You’re doing it. No ifs or buts. And, apart from anything else, the world needs more certainty. Much of how we’re living feels untethered and wobbly. What a wonderful thing to be a bit of solid ground amid the flapping.

Each morning he’d ask himself: ‘What good shall I do this day?’

An anxious person’s gut is a fluttery mess; we don’t know what we want. We are all head, little gut instinct.

If a decision – about a thing or a person – feels 70 per cent right, he just goes with it; 70 per cent is enough:

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 realise this, when we realise that we are not the captains of our own ships. What do we do next? We grip more, grasp outwards more, get busier and more controlling.

Without space, it’s like watching a movie a metre from the cinema screen. We can’t see the whole picture. And we lose ourselves in the noise and the fuzzy pixilation.

gently smile with your eyes.

If you’re still reading this, you might like to know that in the UK some boffins bothered to tally the mood-boosting value of receiving one smile. If the smile is from a friend, it’s equal to the feel-good brain stimulation of 200 chocolate bars; if it comes from a baby it equates to 2000 bars!

These boundaries created certainty anchors and reduced the number of decisions we had to make. They helped us keep on an even keel. But today there are few such boundaries. Information and obligations flood in.

My word, I’m irritable. Not just now. Often. Many of my anxious friends are, too.

I’m also self-conscious of how precious I seem to those around me. And so I spare everyone the pain of it all by disappearing for a bit. Know what I mean?

Monachopsis: (noun) The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach – lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognise the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home. — The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

When we choose to go grim and lo-fi like this we lower our usual expectations, so that simple joys – sunlight, the stillness, the glow of the open fire, a turd being pushed uphill – become wonderfully apparent. With lower expectations there’s less imperative to make things perfect. We can release our grip.

Life is moving on without me. I’ve fallen off the conveyor belt. More hyper-thoughts.

Grace doesn’t bring a party to town. It’s not happiness. It’s not a fleeting high. It’s a delicate, yet whole, gift that whispers in our ear, ‘Life has this one covered’. It tells us that things fit. That you fit. You can’t try to get it, you can’t earn it or deserve it. It just is. Just as a flower doesn’t try to bloom. It just does.

I kept saying to myself and others who asked what the future held, ‘I don’t know’. But I wouldn’t say it despondently; I’d be deliberate about being cool with it. In doing so, I found a strength that is quite defining and satisfying.

Because anxiety, eventually and inevitably, makes us sit in our shit.

That if I want to let go, to truly let go and trust life, I first have to let go of the idea that someone else must hold me while I do it. No one else can tell me that life has this one. I have to do this for myself.