Lessons from Anxiety

| This piece first appeared on Medium on April 9th, 2020 |

Last week, I had a meltdown over the potato-to-sauce-ratio in a curry. I wish I were joking. It would be considerably easier on my ego if I had burst into frantic tears after reading some hard-hitting article in The Atlantic, say, or, I don’t know, upon absorbing a particularly moving poem, or some quietly poignant scene in nature: the last waxy pink petal falling from the Magnolia tree down the street, for example, stoic in its resignation to decay into mildly stinking mush on the pavement, or the fledgling bird which fell to its death outside our front door, only to be snatched up almost immediately by the jaws of some unseen predator. But potatoes it was, in the end.

I had yelped this isn’t how it’s supposed to be! from the kitchen as I poked at the offending curry with a slotted spoon. And what was this? Insistent tears bullying their way forth- over potatoes? My voice sounded strangled and off-key, a schoolboy not long for the choir. I felt my face blotch and ruddy.

And: I felt ridiculous, immediately. I felt stupid, and small, and horrendously ungrateful and horrid. Potatoes. Good Lord. Some people don’t have food at all. I’m a privileged arsehole*, I thought. My husband assured me, as I hiccup-gulped my way through a rambling soliloquy about key workers and hospitals and the elderly and people living below the poverty line, punctuated at intervals by effusive apologies for losing it over potatoes, of all things- that my feelings were perfectly normal, given the circumstances. The potatoes, he wisely pointed out, were simply a convenient foil for matters of much greater magnitude (not a sentence one utters often). Plus, if we wanted to get all Freudian about it: look at what I cried, mid-meltdown: this isn’t how it’s supposed to be!

Of course I know he’s right. It’s a damn sight easier, after all, to get frustrated over potato-to-sauce ratio (or the house being messy, or an inability to do push-ups, or write, or work the virtual meeting program, or when people don’t follow social-distancing rules) than it is to confront large and shadowy terrors you can’t quite see the edges of, let alone describe. There are so few things, in recent weeks, that still fall under our control: it makes sense, then, that our grip of the few remaining variables within our grasp will tighten to ridiculous, white-knuckled proportions.

But there’s a guilt stalking the anxiety I feel: I am, after all, well, and so are my family and friends, at the current time. My husband and I are extremely lucky to be financially stable, in part due to his government job. We are not staring down the barrel of redundancy, as friends are. We do not fall into any at-risk groups. We do not have small children at home around whom we are endlessly, hopelessly, trying to fashion some semblance of a working day. It feels self-indulgent, this anxiety, when there are so many others who have it so much worse.

But anxiety lurks all the same. I lie awake in the early hours, and I read about the doctors and nurses who have died, about the patients who have died, alone and without their families. I cannot imagine anything more horrifying than this. I read about the communities disproportionately affected by the pandemic, about the glaring inequalities in our society which place the heaviest burden on those least able to shoulder it. I read about senators who furtively sold their stocks whilst assuring the public that the economy was safe. I look at a photograph of the burial in Britain of a 13 year old child, his coffin flanked only by strangers in hazmat suits. I wonder whether the family waiting at home knew the hour and the minute and the second their boy was lowered into the ground; whether they felt it in their bodies, a flinching across the great blank space between them. I think of how my husband, a military neurologist, is making preparations for being drafted into front-line services; of how these preparations included upping his life insurance. I think about friends and family members who are immune-compromised or elderly or pregnant, and the fear’s a cliff face I stand at the foot of, too big to see all at once. The fear pins me in place like a butterfly on a board, renders me paralyzed under the cold impersonal glass of the phone-screen and its endless churning-out of news.

If there is one steadying thought in all of this, it is the fact that this pervasive anxiety, and the guilt which accompanies it, are at least partially familiar. There’s a vague tug of recognition, for a lot of us: I am just one of an estimated 40 million adults living in the United States who suffers from clinical anxiety. Anxiety disorders (which include generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, specific phobias, social anxiety, OCD and PTSD) are the most common mental illness in both the U.S., where I now live, and the U.K., where I was born and spent my first three decades.

Anxiety has been a part of my life for the past twenty years: at this stage, we’ve drawn a sort of shaky truce. After a particularly bleak period several years ago, characterized by panic attacks and insomnia and constant, seething terror which left me unable to eat or think or make decisions that weren’t outrageously terrible, I stopped fighting the anxiety so hard, stopped trying to placate it with ill-judged materialistic or romantic pursuits, stopped attempting to obliterate it entirely. I made some changes which both the anxiety and I in our bartering begrudgingly accepted, and it came, if not to heel, then at least to a level I could manage without causing myself any further damage. Less snarling beast, more curmudgeonly cat who’ll occasionally claw you.

It’s fair to say I don’t love having anxiety. I don’t love the way it makes me feel. I don’t love how it has led to some very difficult experiences. I don’t love that to some people, I will only ever be a person with anxiety, and that as such, every feeling or opinion or boundary I assert is written off as the product of a mood disorder. I don’t love that sometimes I still struggle to define myself in other ways, too.

Over the last few weeks, however, I’ve come to suspect that my decades-long anxiety-wrangling might have its benefits. As we all fumble for some sense of order in days suddenly saggy and formless, it’s been interesting to realize that the ways so many of us manage anxiety on a daily basis might just be the ways we can manage quarantine, too.

So, I thought about what I’ve come to learn about anxiety, and about fear. Here is some of it, in no particular order:

I.

Anxiety doesn’t always look like anxiety.

This thing’s sly: it’s a shape-shifter. So, while we brace ourselves for racing thoughts and panic and breathlessness, what we often get instead is procrastination or avoidance or paralysis or inability to focus or obsession or overworking or emptiness. So it might look like those small tasks which suddenly seem insurmountable; that sudden need to scour every surface with bleach until our hands redden raw. It might look like all the projects we cannot face despite suddenly having the time to tackle them, or the hours spent listlessly staring at a screen, the mindless scrolling. And, it might look like an endless cycle of judgment: I’m lazy. I’m unproductive. I’m not good enough. Other people are better at this. Anxiety might look like eating or drinking too much. It might look like unreality, as if the world around you is just a shimmering mirage and the edges of your body are blurring away.

When I first discovered this it felt like a miracle: perhaps I am not lazy, not ridiculous. Perhaps this is merely that same old foe, showing up in borrowed clothes.

II.

We can think we are in tune with our emotions (I did). We can think that feeling strongly equates to feeling fully (yes again). I believed myself to know exactly how I felt about any given issue at any given time, during the worst of my anxiety: I could (and did) prattle on endlessly to whomsoever had the misfortune to ask me how I was. But emoting and experiencing are entirely separate things: so often, the moment we begin to feel the terror- feel anything difficult- we are quick to rationalize or numb it away. I used to search, futilely, for a reason for my panic: I would ask, over and over, could it be this? Could it be that? Inevitably, I would attribute the panic to the wrong cause (Goddamn these potatoes!)

What I couldn’t do, back then, was say just what I felt: my mouth wouldn’t form the words I am scared, or I don’t know how this will end, or I don’t know what to do, or I feel so alone. I couldn’t bear inhabiting any of those feelings, not even for a minute at a time. I’m not alone in this. Some of us feel we mustn’t complain; some of us are too quick to try to seek the positives (it could be worse; I’ve no right to feel this way); some of us drink or eat or run or drug or attempt to love our way out.

The day the lockdown was announced in the U.K., I face-timed with my mother and sister shortly after the press conference had aired on television. My sister was red-eyed and frightened: about her job, and her husband’s, about their house, about their child. After we had finished speaking, she sent me a message. I’m sorry if I seemed blunt, she wrote. I just need to feel shitty about this before I can get on with things.

My sister: infinitely wise, as ever. But we’re terrified of letting ourselves feel upset or angry or depressed, aren’t we? I understand why: the prospect of opening the door to those dark blank corridors of grief, of fear, is horrifying. It feels like giving in. What if we cannot leave? What if the anger and the fear and the sadness doesn’t end? What if it swallows us whole?

A therapist of mine once likened navigating a swelling wave of anxiety or panic to bird-spotting. To her credit she blithely ignored the skepticism which registered over my features almost immediately, all petulant pursing of lips and cocking of brow (I have never been any good at concealing emotion: I’d make for a terrible spy) and calmly elaborated.

It’s about identification, she explained. Name the feeling that lies under the thought. Identify it specifically the way you would a bird.

What is that, then, flickering about? Is it fear? Is it jealousy? Is it anger, loneliness, grief?

In her beautiful book The Places that Scare You, Pema Chodron says of this process:

‘Being compassionate enough to accommodate our own fears takes courage, of course, and it definitely feels counterintuitive. But it’s what we need to do.’

In identifying what lies underneath, in allowing it, there’s an acknowledgement we very often refuse to give ourselves permission to make: the acknowledge that for this moment, there’s no minimizing things, no positive spin, no putting a brave-bloody-face on it. This is hard, and scary, and it might not be better for a long, long time. There is no internal tussle, then, to squash the fear down. It’s a hard space to inhabit, but as Chodron points out, to inhabit it, even briefly, ‘feels like a genuine act of kindness to ourselves’- because without the struggle to quash our emotions, or avoid them, there’s nothing to impede the natural progression of our thoughts, which, without the echo-chamber of denial or rumination, is mercifully, fairly brief: the work of mere minutes.

For thoughts, and feelings, even the worst and most terrifying ones, pass.

The horrors will take you over, periodically, yes: but they will also spit you out again, if you don’t clutch at them. When they pass, you are still afraid- things may still be bad, and scary, and uncertain- but you are not totally terrified, are not totally paralyzed, at least not for right now: you can get up and go for a walk or make a cup of tea or watch the birds on the tree outside your window. And you can do so knowing that when the storm comes again (and it will) you can weather it.

III.

Routine is our friend.

I used to like to think of myself as anti-routine (my younger self, if you haven’t already come to this conclusion, was fairly unbearable at times). Routine seemed the stuff of staid and boring. I failed to see that much of my life hinged around routine: that my days were reliably ordered by work and by the unhelpful behaviors I repeated in an attempt to feel better, to feel different, to feel less like I wanted to tear off my skin and flee from myself.

Now, I have realized that keeping to a routine is one of the single most useful things I can do to manage my anxiety, to keep it within a tolerable level at least most of the time.

This routine is comprised of behaviors which help, rather than hurt me: there is no more confiding in people who do not have my best interests at heart; there is no more staying up into the wee hours on school-nights or binging or drinking too much red wine or spending too much time on social media or failing to pick up the phone. Now, in the absence of a school-bell structuring my time, I build my day around certain non-negotiables: writing, reading, communicating with friends and family, moving, eating well(ish), sitting for even a minute in silence.

Adherence to this routine looks different on different days: sometimes it looks like running three miles and writing for hours and cooking elaborate meals from scratch. Sometimes it looks more like three scrawled-out sentences, a text-message, and dinner out of a tin. No matter: these are points around which to hang the hours. These are things we can look at and say, see what I have done.

IV.

My husband, and other people who know me well, will say I have a tendency to ‘get in my head.’ I think lots of us do this. And, let me be clear: I think it can be a marvelous thing, this being in our own heads. I believe it’s where a lot of art and literature and innovation and emotional intelligence comes from, this ability to retreat from the external world and follow the wisp of an idea until it solidifies into something tangible, something real.

There is a down side, though. There’s rumination. There’s obsessing over the past, or the future. There’s a constant conjuring-up of narratives which explain everything that has ever happened or will ever happen, and an urgent, blinkered seeking of evidence to fit that story, however far from reality it might ultimately be.

Now, let’s be honest: there’s plenty to be in our own heads about, in April 2020.

And- the future may well mirror some of the worst stories we can tell ourselves, there’s no getting around it; but there’s no good to be done settling into our darkest imaginings before they’ve even materialized. All the worry in the world can’t change how things will pan out; they can only leave us a frazzled and depleted mess in the meantime, when we could be doing things to help ourselves and help others or just simply get through the days. Getting out of our own heads doesn’t equate to lying back and passively accepting whatever happens: it means doing what we can to ensure when the time comes we are able to take action, to keep going, to do hard things.

Something I’ve found entirely helpful: it’s harder to be in one’s head when one is in one’s body.

Movement takes us out of the mind and into the body. It provides some mental distance, a little breathing space, a welcome opening in the incessant stream of worry and stewing and gnawing things over. As someone with the natural grace and coordination of an infant giraffe, coupled with fairly upsetting memories of high-school P.E. which still pop up, unbidden, at the merest whiff of eau de locker-room or mention of ‘fun’ kick-abouts, I am greatly sympathetic towards those of you who rolled your eyes at this statement. Let me be the first to say: I am no athlete. But I have found that moving helps to ground me when I am struggling. I cycle indoors on a stationary bike, and practice yoga (albeit a stiff and decidedly unbendy version of it). I go outside for our daily exercise allowance and walk around our neighborhood and look at the blossoms on the trees and the squirrels who twitch there amid those bright petals.

And when I am done, I feel calmer.

Within the physical body there are no endless thoughts; there is only the quickening of the pulse and the contraction of muscle, a steady ragged inhale and exhale of breath. Within the physical body, there is no past, no future; there is only now. There is only the constant beating of the heart.

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned in my twenty-odd years of grappling with anxiety, though, is also the hardest to swallow.

I have strategies, now. I have a routine which helps, and practical things to do when panic hits. I have learned to manage my anxiety better. But- and here it comes, the kicker- all the knowledge, all the experience, all the strategies: they do not remove the anxiety itself. They are not some magical talisman which wards off bad things. Bad things continue to happen. I continue to feel afraid. The waves keep on coming.

I try to draw on my experience with anxiety to manage the way I am feeling in our current climate, but I know that I cannot control what happens, no matter how good I get at identifying my feelings (sorry, potatoes; it never was about you, not really) or soothing myself, or maintaining routine. There are people suffering right now, and there is more suffering to come. This is the hardest truth of all to face: that pain is unavoidable, that injustice exists, that there is no level playing field, that there are some of us who are going to get through this relatively unscathed and others who will find their lives decimated, and that the reasons for this are often connected with race or class or gender or age or employment status or post-code or other reasons which shouldn’t determine whether we live or die but demonstrably do.

So what do we do with this? What do we do about the fact that the cause of our collective anxiety looms as large and as terrifying as ever?

I don’t know, any more than any of us knows what the solution is. But I’d argue that right now, we control the controllables. We establish routine, we move, we choose to step into the place Chodron calls ‘edgy and uncertain’- a place in which we are able to sit with painful and fearful feelings as they arise, even if it’s just for a few minutes, with faith that if we do so, we are better able to move beyond them and into a place where we can help ourselves, and then help others, where we can effect change within our communities, and beyond them.

There’s a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke I’ve always loved. My favorite part reads:

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Just keep going, then: no feeling is final. And when we emerge from the other side of this- whenever that might be-we can carry with us the lessons we’ve learned from anxiety, from fear, from the hidden parts of ourselves, and we can use them for something good.

* I’d argue, though, that this is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact that it is a very important thing, for very many of us to remember as we go through our lives, and before we open our mouths, or spend our money, or cast our votes.