Looking Away From Worry
My life is an amazing narrative, and lately that narrative has been the emergence of a soul from unwanted worry — something people call anxiety. I have been imprisoned by worry, I have recognized that I no longer want to be limited by it, and I have changed my relationship with worry to help transform how I think and act.
Every day, I feel more aware of how my thinking affects my behavior and I have some control over it.
For five years or so I have been eviscerating any anxiety that I can find. Feeling worried is so detrimental to what I want of my life that it became untenable. I have a lot of eviscerating yet to do.
I define unhealthy worry, often called anxiety, this way:
Defending myself against awful possible futures.
It robs one of the present. It also guides your life towards those awful possible futures. I noticed that decision making when I am in particularly worried states are based on very strange criteria. I have also seen this in other people close to me who are built with intense worry.
It is a really unpleasant way to live. I realized that some friends of mine did not live this way. They would be completely content at times, without worry. When planning a trip, they would think about the positive things that would happen, not how to avoid extremely unlikely risks. They could camp in Utah without obsessing over Junta Virus.
Other people who do not have damaging relationships with worry live a different experience. Some events are out of their hands. In the end they can deal with what happens in the moment it happens. That is the opposite of anxiety.
That was a tough step to stumble into. It is not easy to recognize that what I felt was not the only way that one could feel. In our culture, in our families, worry can become our language and our currency. To worry about someone is to say that you care about them. We want to respond to the worries of those we love, we put our energy and art into filling what we think is the negative space of worry. We want to soothe worry.
But worry is not negative space. Worry is a presence, and attending to it feeds it, allows it to grow.
Unless you have something to compare it to, worry is normal, the house you grew up in.
When I was 20, I spent about a week where I would go to work, go to school, then go home. Outside of those requirements, I could neither speak or move. My girlfriend was terrified. The problem was largely that our relationship was not working and I did not know how to break up. My hopes and happiness were broken. We broke up and I got far worse for a time and then got much better. I decided that was not normal, but I recall pretty much concluding that it was her fault.
I have on many occasions been locked in a battle with exaggerated worry while driving or riding in a car as well as when riding a motorcycle. It has been downright dangerous to try to negotiate my feelings while also operating a fast vehicle. There were times when I chose to pull over and hope my condition changed and there have been times when I have continued on, telling myself that my perception of the situation was not reliable. Still, at first I felt that was a reasonable experience, considering the dangerous nature of vehicles and my own unreliability as a pilot.
I did not really start working on reducing worry in my life until I was 35, but there was an important experience several years prior. I have taken the drug ecstasy only once. It was several hours of feeling relieved of the weight of worry. I did not have much of a desire to use that drug again, but I drew from that a baseline understanding that some people don’t feel the need to drive themselves with anxiety.
Like a lot of authors on this subject who are able to look into their worry, I have realized that my parents are anxiety-powered people. Each uses the high-test fuel of anxiety in their own way. They are divorced now, and such different people that it is hard to imagine them as a couple. These days I wonder if anxiety is the only thing that kept them together. Whatever they were decades ago is not what they are now. They both work on improving themselves. They are wonderful human beings working hard to be good. Their paths are different than mine, but they want to be better as well.
When I speak to either of them, I set a mental gap out of (get this:) fear of worry. I need to separate myself from their speech because I hear so much anxiety-driven (and thus anxiety producing) language. I worry how it affects me and want to repel it.
If I were more rational, I would know that their language does not affect me at all unless I allow it to. However, the release from a fair amount of my worry still feels magical. As magic, it is hard to say how to prevent it from evaporating. Could some of their worry stick back on to me?
With both of them, I now realize that we built a life of conversation about mastering worry. That does not mean we talked about how to overcome anxiety, we were getting better and better at worrying more about further refinements of the world. Whenever things are good, it was natural to look about for something to apply worry to.
When I started noticing that others were not driven by worry, defined by worry, I tried attributing the difference to social class. I thought that worry was the natural right and badge of the insecure poor. I now know that is not the case. People in all social classes have anxiety issues. People change economic status and take their anxiety with them.
Side note: Worry is not a good attribute for high performing individuals, generally.
There is a very popular article by Daniel Smith from a few years ago about anxiety, Understanding My Anxiety.
Daniel Smith is a good writer, but I can not connect with his approach to anxiety. It seems like he views himself as permanently broken in an incomprehensible way and that all he can do is manage the beast.
He also looks to his family as a source of the experience, and he is looking to become better.
I fear that they are only making a more sophisticated version of worry that they continue to feed. He has created categories for how people react to anxiety. The stifler keeps it in and has nervous tics that signify their worry. The chaotic explodes and shares the result with society. He then erodes these definitions, saying that a chaotic is just a stifler who has failed to stifle. It seems invented, a paper tiger of taxonomy. I avoid these sorts of explorations. It gives the worry more power.
Worry is a thing I do. It is a thing that I can also NOT do. That continues to be my effort. To have the experience of thinking about the present and the future in reasonable proportion and to aim towards positive outcomes.
Daniel Smith and I have a lot in common, having read that article. We both find our bias as well as a soothing path in literature. I learned to intensify my anxiety by reading literature that builds critique and analysis upon rough-hewn characters. He identified with Philip Roth characters that offer “defiance in the face of shame.”
Now, I catch opportunities to encroach on worry’s territory. Literature can be a great place to pick out anti-worry revelations and touchstones for lighter living. Candide by Voltaire concludes shortly after this quote:
Let’s work without theorizing. It is the only way to make like bearable.”
This was my Facebook post after finishing the book:
I love Hamlet, but it is a story built around anxious focus on a bad outcome! Hamlet spends the whole play dreading the last scene. When the bad outcome finally happens, he is relieved.
My worry state completely understands this. The outcome, the most dreaded outcome, is a relief. Even more unfortunate, bad outcomes reinforce that it is good to worry.
Worrying is theorizing, in a way. It is thinking about things that are unnecessary to think about. I think that this can be undone. I feel that I am undoing it. I do not think of myself as an anxious person anymore and am not perceived as one. This was not always the case. I still worry, but I am currently not exhibiting the clinical signs of anxiety that I once did.
After I realized that worry was an option, I was able to identify some situations that cause me to worry in a way that I did not want to. Preparing to travel, for instance. It still can get me worked up. I try to not feed it, but sometimes it asks a lot of me and I respond to it. I have no respect for that feeling. It is doing me no good.
Somehow, it is not as powerful when I look at it from outside the envolope. My outcomes need to be separate from the worry.
I have done a lot of this work on my own, and then when I entered therapy found a wealth of expertise that helped me further move my thinking away from worry.
I feel that I have cognitively come to understand my reaction to experiences. I understand the situation from a more productive and enjoyable way. This is not the story of a typical lead character in literature, or the stuff of an edgy psychological profile. This is what happens in real life to people.
I have chosen to look away from worry and over time I am moving away from worry. That is my current experience with anxiety. When I read Daniel Smith I understand the problems he experienced. I am glad that he can talk with another family member about it, because it is not always visible to family. I don’t talk to my brother about worry. That might be a very powerful experience. To my knowledge, he does not have the same concern or perception of worry.
When I hear about Daniel and his brother talking constantly about anxiety, I understand the importance and power of pulling it out and wording it. Particularly something that is taking control of you. However, I feel that by constantly looking at it, he is moving deeper into it.
My belief that we can initiate change our lives with conscious thought is consciously reinforced. I have had the pleasure of watching the drunkest, rowdiest dude turn into a family man without much fuss. I believe we can change. People can progress — let me put this differently — people do progress in the direction they are looking.
I am looking away from worry.
