Does my anxiety make me better?

So. Let’s talk about that part of the human experience where you feel like a weird freak alien most of the time. You know what I mean, right? 

Right? 

Just kidding, I’m not worried about that part. If there’s one thing poetry lends its humble servants in this life, it is the sublime and permanent assurance that we’re not alone in a damn thing. Never, not ever. As such, I’d like to start this publicized therapy session with a poem - the best way to start anything. 

Taylor Johnson, “I am not separate from the likeness.” 

I am not separate from the likeness

of the world. I have to remind myself

that. Time unfurls its tongue just

before it dissolves. Shall I show

my hand, it says, and I take the tongue

into my mouth. There is this wild slide like

green rising from black in the morning. There is no self.

Foremost it’s like grasping thunder, trying

to hold still the curtain of time. Into

the filaments I cast my breath, not its likeness.

So, here we are. Two people who have set aside the borrowed instinct to politely feign an impenetrable resilience. Life gets heavy and it gets ugly. The brain - or worse, the mind, the intuitive emotional consciousness - in best efforts to save our mortal lives, often misfires. Disastrously. It’s not flattering to discuss dusty corners & worst moments, but we’re doing it anyway. How cool of us. 

Two people, just two people. With two high-level executive functions. Two sets of dreams, imaginative desires, and meaningful designs on that elusive good life. 

It’s easy to confuse anxiety for drive, attentiveness, care. In many ways, it is because you are driven, attentive, and caring that you are also anxious. And absolutely not the other way around. At all. The fear that healing will kill the [analytical / “together” / prepared / considerate] part of you is as unfounded as it is unhelpful. You’ll still be you. You don’t get extra points for withstanding torture, unfortunately for the both of us. 

Furthermore: it’s way-easy to confuse healing with brute-force manual control over our behaviors and reactions. It’s definitely your responsibility to do no harm, for sure. When push comes to shove, yeah, active self-management is probably a good skill. Just, you’re a surgeon, not the guy who mops up blood. Inside-out is better. Not cheaper, not cheap at all. Better. 

There are a few root causes of anxiety. 

The first one is a chemical imbalance in the brain. Can’t help you there, though I am with you, which sometimes helps by some fraction of one percent. We live in a society - or so I’ve heard - the conditions of which are pretty favorable for creating this imbalance. There are options out there, none of them perfect, some of them somewhat helpful. I’m nowhere near smart enough to solve that one. If you are: I’m waiting! 

I believe the rest can be separated into two buckets.

1. Fear of the unknown or fear of disaster. 

   • This one is the most difficult to combat because it’s the most reasonable. Crazy bad things happen all the time, to anyone and everyone. If you drop the ball, it breaks. Your loved ones are mortal. Injustice prevails and the world is ending. Nothing is ever the same again, not even tomorrow. Um, thanks? Sorry. 

   • I’ve found the reality of the human condition to be fairly unresolvable. There are a few things that help, though! 

     • Cognitively reframe the aforementioned unresolvable realities. (The temporality of life makes each moment more valuable. I solve the problems I can solve, make the impact I can make, love the people I can love. Et cetera.) 

     • Build self-trust by doing hard things when you reeeeally don’t want to. Everything you handle makes you a better handler of things. 

     • Focus on what you can actually do and what you actually have. Do what you can. Care for what you have. Physically, with your actions, with your attention, with your time. Then call it good and mean it. (This is not so much one bullet point as it is the entire tamale. If it were easy, it would be useless to write this. Maybe it still is. This is great, let’s keep breaking the fourth wall. Let’s let the void eat us. You and me, baby!) 

2. Low self-esteem or excessive self-perception. 

   • These two things sound like opposites. They are not. This encompasses every sneaky, radiating belief that you are somehow unloveable, too much, not enough, too weird, too fucked up, a failure, destined for failure - whatever it is for you. Maybe all. Hopefully none, but I’ve yet to meet such a well-parented psyche. Whatever it is, at whatever moment, that causes you to excessively monitor yourself, your environment, or other people. The classic, chanting self-hatred: for a people-pleaser, I’m not pleasing anyone! Jeez, man. You’re just a person! 

   • The excellent news here is that this one is way more solvable. Still a lifelong journey, as is so often the case. But, you know, hey! 

     • In the oft-invoked words of the former GIRLS star, Jemima Jo Kirke: “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.” Self-awareness is like using a q-tip to clean your ears. A little goes a long way. Kill that sniveling little navel-gazer in you by shifting your focus outward: tune first to your physical body, then to what you’re doing, then to other people. And keep it there. I can’t believe we’re back to talking about how giving love freely is the answer. (I can.) 

     • Use gratitude and affirmations sparingly and with tactical precision. It doesn’t do anything to insist that a bad day was actually a good day because the sun was out, or to recite compliments at yourself in the mirror. You know good and well you’re checked out of that empty bullshit. You don’t need to love yourself, you need to love being yourself - in other words, waking up each morning to the fresh providence of conscious existence. You don’t need to believe you’re already the person you want to be, you need to believe you’re capable of values-based identity shifts toward a more congruent expression of your authentic potential. 

     • Take the time to notice the beliefs, narratives, and statements of self that come up. Unexpectedly, in the messy course of a messy life. Make an honest effort to notice, to see, and to lovingly redirect. Like your own excellent parent. Par exemple: “I’m not good at thinking of creative ideas” becomes “In the past, I may not have thought of myself as someone who thinks of creative ideas. This is clearly untrue, because I have thought of plenty of creative ideas. Such as: [list a few]. I am capable of doing so again.” Tedious, absolutely, sure. And loving. And worthwhile. 

My fellow on this path: accept my earnest care for your term-limited soul. It’s tough out there! It’s brutal, in fact. But the spectrum has joy on it, too. And connection, and peace, and meaning. Messy though it may be, and certainly is. Let’s scratch the above and leave only with this: the divine in me honors the divine in you. We walk together.