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The gift of anxiety
Sep. 7th, 2022 04:24 pmThis may come as a surprise to you, but I am a highly anxious person. Which is to say that I am a diagnosed, mentally unwell, clinical depression-and-GAD with a cherry of PTSD on top person. Not just "I feel a little anxious sometimes" but "I'm under supervision by a medical professional about it" kind of thing.
I suffer from it. It's not great. I hate it, in fact. I wake up at 4 am on a regular basis, often from nightmares, heart racing, consumed by intense and specific worries. My heart races. In the past, though thankfully not for awhile, I've had panic attacks that are so bad I thought I was having a heart attack. 0/10, strongly do not recommend.
And hence this post is going to sound a little weird.
If I had to define what anxiety is for me on a personal level, it's the ability to picture future or potential scenarios that feel as if they are currently happening or are inevitably going to happen. For example, thinking about the potential death of a loved one results in a physical and emotional reaction similar to if that death had actually happened. Extremely vivid nightmares that feel real. The sense—as I've written before—that you are leaning back in a chair and have leaned so far back that righting yourself is impossible, but the full tip over to the hard floor hasn't happened yet.
I can neither, at this point in my life, disentangle this from either my personality or my ability to write fiction, where conjuring the specific emotion resulting from a potential scenario is a slightly useful skill. Trust me, though, I've tried a lot. The best I can do is mute it with meds, which cause other problems, or create workarounds where I redirect the pathway of my future-thinking towards how I might deal with those scenarios. Yes, I've tried yoga. Yes, I've tried mindfulness. The latter is contraindicated for someone like me.
Conversely, I am very often around people who do not suffer from anxiety. They may feel anxious about a given situation—a job interview, an illness, even climate change in general when they think about it—but they're not constantly doing this. These people are generally assured that things will work out as they should, or that worrying won't help. "It is what it is," they'll say, or "it'll be fine."
I don't really know what causes someone to have one personality type versus the other. Certainly, I have lived experience where things have expressly not worked out for the best. But I've met folks who live on the street who've had much worse lives than I do, for whom things are still not working out at all, and they're more optimistic than I am. It isn't just trauma, or even primarily trauma. I'm sure there's a genetic or familial component too—Jews are neurotic, and all the women in my family are like this, really.
Anxiety is, in many ways, a motivator for me. I mentioned the depression as well. If anxiety is living too much in the future, depression is dwelling in the past. Depression brain tells you to sleep all day and eat chips; anxiety brain reminds you that if you do that, you'll be out of a job. And if you don't perform at 110% at that job, you'll be out of a job. Your employers have already started planning as to how they're going to fire you, in fact, so get on that now. You shouldn't have made this post public because if they find out you have a mental illness, it's over for you.
A disproportionate number of teachers suffer from anxiety. A disproportionate number of administrators do not. A surprising number of students don't (you hear that they're all anxious these days, but I promise it's not all of them). This makes for a lot of clashes, as you can imagine. It's frustrating for someone who does not have the reassurance that things will work out for the best to have to interact with someone who does. Especially when we're in a global pandemic. I'm a person who reads that there's somewhere between a 1 in 5 and a 1 in 20 chance of getting long covid, and so I assume I'll be that one. But I'm surrounded by people who either don't think it's a possibility at all, or don't think it'll be anyone they know.
But while anxiety is devalued, and sucks, on a personal level, it honestly has its benefits on a broader societal level. A common theory for humans evolving this tendency is that while you need people who are bold and confident to lead a community, said little community gets wiped out pretty quickly without the person who can't sleep because they're watching the grass for tigers. We spend a lot of time talking about wellness and self-care and living in the moment, but we are right now living the consequences of having all lived in the moment, without worrying one bit about the future. It's pretty obvious with the pandemic that we'd all probably do a lot better if we'd heeded the many experts who warned about the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic, or even if we behaved more like the people who think they'll contract long covid if they catch it than the people who don't believe it will happen to them.
Soft climate change denial is another great example of this. It's not outright Fox News MAGA denial of the climate crisis. It's the sense that you might have (that I sometimes even have) that while obviously man-made climate change exists, and is a problem, but...someone will have to work it out, right? Governments will have to cut emissions because this is untenable. And hey, there's probably some genius working on a solution right now. Tech will save us! 900 million people in China and 33 million people in Pakistan probably have very different ideas about how well that will work out. Each successive government kicks the can down the road, waiting for some better future where it'll get fixed.
And of course, I've been thinking about Barbara Ehrenreich, who wasn't a perfect person but in many ways was a brilliant person who changed my life. She died last Thursday, at the age of 81. Her book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, covers the pitfalls of optimism and magical thinking, from her own breast cancer diagnosis to capitalism itself. By subscribing to the belief that if we're just positive enough, everything will be okay, we risk substituting those happy thoughts for tangible action. Cynical cancer patients are have a better prognosis; nations that plan for disaster mitigation do better when extreme weather strikes, and so on.
I recently learned about chronic wasting disease, and hoo-boy my life would have been better if I hadn't. It's a prion disease, similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, that affects deer. We caused it by trying to domesticate deer in the 60s, and now it's escaped into the wild. It's transmitted through soil. It hasn't jumped to humans, but there's a good chance that it will. So far, the same eggheads sounding the alarm over coronaviruses are also sounding the alarm over this, but nothing is happening on a policy level. Everyone is just...kinda hoping it works out.
Politics is a career that, alas, tends to attract people who are confident and not anxious. And thus we have leaders who live in the moment, who plan for four years at a time maximum, who don't wake up at 4 am with nightmare scenarios of zombie deer and agricultural workers dying of heatstroke. Our society is structured, in fact, around the present, the eternal now during which we can never learn from the past nor contemplate the future.
And that's why anxiety is a gift that causes me a great deal of misery, but which I dearly wish sometimes that I could pass on to others.
Everything will not be okay. The sooner we wake up to this, the better.
I suffer from it. It's not great. I hate it, in fact. I wake up at 4 am on a regular basis, often from nightmares, heart racing, consumed by intense and specific worries. My heart races. In the past, though thankfully not for awhile, I've had panic attacks that are so bad I thought I was having a heart attack. 0/10, strongly do not recommend.
And hence this post is going to sound a little weird.
If I had to define what anxiety is for me on a personal level, it's the ability to picture future or potential scenarios that feel as if they are currently happening or are inevitably going to happen. For example, thinking about the potential death of a loved one results in a physical and emotional reaction similar to if that death had actually happened. Extremely vivid nightmares that feel real. The sense—as I've written before—that you are leaning back in a chair and have leaned so far back that righting yourself is impossible, but the full tip over to the hard floor hasn't happened yet.
I can neither, at this point in my life, disentangle this from either my personality or my ability to write fiction, where conjuring the specific emotion resulting from a potential scenario is a slightly useful skill. Trust me, though, I've tried a lot. The best I can do is mute it with meds, which cause other problems, or create workarounds where I redirect the pathway of my future-thinking towards how I might deal with those scenarios. Yes, I've tried yoga. Yes, I've tried mindfulness. The latter is contraindicated for someone like me.
Conversely, I am very often around people who do not suffer from anxiety. They may feel anxious about a given situation—a job interview, an illness, even climate change in general when they think about it—but they're not constantly doing this. These people are generally assured that things will work out as they should, or that worrying won't help. "It is what it is," they'll say, or "it'll be fine."
I don't really know what causes someone to have one personality type versus the other. Certainly, I have lived experience where things have expressly not worked out for the best. But I've met folks who live on the street who've had much worse lives than I do, for whom things are still not working out at all, and they're more optimistic than I am. It isn't just trauma, or even primarily trauma. I'm sure there's a genetic or familial component too—Jews are neurotic, and all the women in my family are like this, really.
Anxiety is, in many ways, a motivator for me. I mentioned the depression as well. If anxiety is living too much in the future, depression is dwelling in the past. Depression brain tells you to sleep all day and eat chips; anxiety brain reminds you that if you do that, you'll be out of a job. And if you don't perform at 110% at that job, you'll be out of a job. Your employers have already started planning as to how they're going to fire you, in fact, so get on that now. You shouldn't have made this post public because if they find out you have a mental illness, it's over for you.
A disproportionate number of teachers suffer from anxiety. A disproportionate number of administrators do not. A surprising number of students don't (you hear that they're all anxious these days, but I promise it's not all of them). This makes for a lot of clashes, as you can imagine. It's frustrating for someone who does not have the reassurance that things will work out for the best to have to interact with someone who does. Especially when we're in a global pandemic. I'm a person who reads that there's somewhere between a 1 in 5 and a 1 in 20 chance of getting long covid, and so I assume I'll be that one. But I'm surrounded by people who either don't think it's a possibility at all, or don't think it'll be anyone they know.
But while anxiety is devalued, and sucks, on a personal level, it honestly has its benefits on a broader societal level. A common theory for humans evolving this tendency is that while you need people who are bold and confident to lead a community, said little community gets wiped out pretty quickly without the person who can't sleep because they're watching the grass for tigers. We spend a lot of time talking about wellness and self-care and living in the moment, but we are right now living the consequences of having all lived in the moment, without worrying one bit about the future. It's pretty obvious with the pandemic that we'd all probably do a lot better if we'd heeded the many experts who warned about the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic, or even if we behaved more like the people who think they'll contract long covid if they catch it than the people who don't believe it will happen to them.
Soft climate change denial is another great example of this. It's not outright Fox News MAGA denial of the climate crisis. It's the sense that you might have (that I sometimes even have) that while obviously man-made climate change exists, and is a problem, but...someone will have to work it out, right? Governments will have to cut emissions because this is untenable. And hey, there's probably some genius working on a solution right now. Tech will save us! 900 million people in China and 33 million people in Pakistan probably have very different ideas about how well that will work out. Each successive government kicks the can down the road, waiting for some better future where it'll get fixed.
And of course, I've been thinking about Barbara Ehrenreich, who wasn't a perfect person but in many ways was a brilliant person who changed my life. She died last Thursday, at the age of 81. Her book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, covers the pitfalls of optimism and magical thinking, from her own breast cancer diagnosis to capitalism itself. By subscribing to the belief that if we're just positive enough, everything will be okay, we risk substituting those happy thoughts for tangible action. Cynical cancer patients are have a better prognosis; nations that plan for disaster mitigation do better when extreme weather strikes, and so on.
I recently learned about chronic wasting disease, and hoo-boy my life would have been better if I hadn't. It's a prion disease, similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, that affects deer. We caused it by trying to domesticate deer in the 60s, and now it's escaped into the wild. It's transmitted through soil. It hasn't jumped to humans, but there's a good chance that it will. So far, the same eggheads sounding the alarm over coronaviruses are also sounding the alarm over this, but nothing is happening on a policy level. Everyone is just...kinda hoping it works out.
Politics is a career that, alas, tends to attract people who are confident and not anxious. And thus we have leaders who live in the moment, who plan for four years at a time maximum, who don't wake up at 4 am with nightmare scenarios of zombie deer and agricultural workers dying of heatstroke. Our society is structured, in fact, around the present, the eternal now during which we can never learn from the past nor contemplate the future.
And that's why anxiety is a gift that causes me a great deal of misery, but which I dearly wish sometimes that I could pass on to others.
Everything will not be okay. The sooner we wake up to this, the better.
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