Dear Readers,

It’s with a broken heart that I write to you today, to let you know that this month is Anxy’s last.

For the past few years, I’ve been running Anxy as an internal project within my consulting practice. It started as something I could take on twice a year, alongside other client work. As the magazine grew in readership and we gained further recognition for our work, I increasingly felt like I was running two very different types of businesses. I downsized my studio and explored what it would take to commit full-time to Anxy. In May, I took a break from the magazine to reflect and recalibrate the possibilities for our brand and our community. I wanted to explore the question, can Anxy be more than a personal passion project? More than a print magazine?

Anxy already gave voice to a global community seeking deeper meaning from our life experiences. What would it take for us to go further, to become a multi-channel brand — the voice of the mental wellness movement? I started envisioning an Anxy that included regular online content, a podcast, and a yearly conference where we could meet IRL. I dreamed of creating an Anxy app that provided another layer of storytelling and psychoeducation. In my wildest ambitions, I imagined Anxy wellness and self-care products, as well as Anxy documentaries and TV.

All of this necessitated significant outside capital, of course. We couldn’t accelerate our momentum without a full-time editorial, product, and design team. Thus far, we’ve been mostly crowdfunded, money that’s helped cover some of the magazine production costs, but hasn’t been enough to support the team behind the magazine. I started conversations with advisors and friends about how to approach VCs, built a pitch deck, and mapped our potential trajectory and growth goals. I got feedback, made revisions, got more feedback, and continued to refine our pitch further.

I did my best to present the untapped potential of Anxy. None of the conversations led to funding. While being a print publication was a strength for us, for investors, it was a limitation. They wanted to see a digital product, with low cost and high profitability, something able to scale exponentially and show deep traction. It made me wonder if, in the end, our truth is more art than commerce.

It’s also no mystery that media is becoming almost impossible to fund. In the last year, we’ve seen the closure or scaling-down of some of our favorite publications. Advertising is no longer a viable revenue source. We are left to witness the real-time restructuring of media business models.

Grief has filled my last few months as I’ve run out of runway to explore Anxy’s future any further. But this ending is bittersweet. In my heart, I know the impact of the work we’ve done and the legacy we leave behind.

We started this project in 2016, before the #metoo movement gained momentum, before the current president took office, before it was so commonplace to share without shame what’s really going on in our lives. Anxy has demonstrated that addressing an audience through vulnerability and creativity is significantly more effective than communication strategies focused on pathology. We’ve become a shining example of the power of storytelling, art, and design as vehicles for meaningful conversations about mental health.

I’m proud that we created a new entry point for thinking about mental wellness through our magazine. Regardless of culture, language, or distance, readers connected with and felt seen through our stories. Anxy was a genuine manifestation of the deeply personal becoming universal. It became a place for expression, for beauty, and for me to better understand myself and release the pain I was carrying. Anxy was the place I wish I could always go to. Anxy is the project I now have to let go.

Officially, we will be closing our operations in November. We won’t be releasing new issues. Our shop will remain open for the foreseeable future, until we’ve run out of inventory. We will continue to activate our social channels, as needed, to share promotions, articles, and help sell our leftover stock.

I’ll be reaching out to those of you with open subscriptions about your options to receive refunds or to use remaining subscription funds in our shop. We will continue to work with our stockists to make our issues available until we run out of copies.

I feel deeply grateful to have been involved in this project. There are so many people I need to thank for their generosity and grace in making Anxy possible.

First of all, a huge thanks to our editorial team, starting with Bobbie Johnson, who has been an advocate and collaborator since I first shared the idea with him. To Jennifer Maerz and Sarah Rich, who advised me early on and provided me with encouragement and wisdom. To Maddie Kahn, Katie MacBride, and Michelle Le, who brought their talent and voices to Anxy and made the magazine richer in return. To Kati Krause, who brought us stories with a global point of view and didn’t care that we were hundreds of miles apart.

To the design and operations staff: Alma Avila, Livia Foldes, Rachel Gepner, Sonja Murphy, Ian Siverstol, Jeannine Ventura, Nicholas Law, who weathered all the storms, bringing their creativity and love for design into this endeavor. And to our advisors, Natalie Harvey, LMFT, and Natasha Vienna, for providing perspective. I owe a deep, special thanks to Natasha for her involvement in the last 6 months, helping me navigate the investor landscape and working closely with me to imagine our possible futures. I’m forever grateful, in that same token to MM, HW, ZB, and CE (you know who you are!), who made themselves available in this process without asking anything in return.

Last, I want to thank every backer, every family member, every friend, every friend of a friend, every online customer, every single person who shared their Anxy with us. We couldn’t exist without your love. It was absolutely a community effort. The awards and accolades are just a signifier of the impact we’ve created together. We see you and acknowledge your contribution to creating this legacy.

I couldn’t close without mentioning my partner, Jason, to whom I owe a great deal of gratitude for his patience, support, and understanding throughout this journey. He has witnessed every struggle, and held my hand through it all. He lent his talent generously, whether it was for the cover design of issue №1, the voiceovers in our videos, or the animation for our Kickstarters — you name it, he was there. Even in the darkest moments, he allowed me to find my own way, without demands. Love is healing, Jason, and you are a testament to that fact. ❤

Our personal truth changes as our story evolves. There’s no doubt that this year has been one of fundamental transition. A shift towards shedding layers. I have yet to fully discover what remains.

People often ask me why I created Anxy. For the past three years, I have answered that I wanted to find other stories like mine. I wanted us to be honest about all the painful experiences we confront in our lives. It felt good to create something real for a cause I care deeply about.

If someone were to ask me again today, I would say I created Anxy because I was longing for relief from a deep sense of loneliness. Loneliness that only a lifetime of feeling invisible can manifest. I created Anxy for the times I wished someone would have been there, would have seen me, would have witnessed my suffering, would have shared their struggle, and would have protected me.

I feel honored to have been held by all of you.

Sincerely,
Indhira Rojas

A Farewell from Anxy was originally published in Anxy Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Everyone’s talking about masculinity right now. From #MeToo to #NeverAgain, from pop culture to politics, questions about what masculinity means — and how it affects us — are everywhere. What are the roots of masculinity? How does it shape individuals and cultures? How is it changing across generations? We’re especially curious about the relationship between masculinity and our inner worlds. So, for the next issue of Anxy, we’re looking at how masculinity relates to mental health.

Masculinity has many faces, and we’re interested in all of them. Regardless of gender or culture, it influences the way we think about ourselves and the people around us. There are people who see masculinity as a clearly defined set of rules to be strictly followed, while others see it as a malleable and evolving sense of self. There are those who play with what masculinity means, and others who see it as a cage. We all carry masculine elements inside us, we witness masculine behaviors in our relationships and friendships, we hear masculine norms echo through our thoughts and feelings, even when we don’t realize it.

For Anxy №4 we’re interested in how masculinity — whether consciously or subconsciously — appears in our everyday lives and impacts our inner worlds. We’re particularly curious about ideas of power, sex, identity, gender, violence, parenthood, language, and work.

What impact does masculinity, however you define it, have on you? What stories can you tell about the way it affects your mental health or the health of your community? What aspects of masculinity haven’t been discussed? And what needs to be talked about?

Pitch to us here

We want you to get creative.

What stories can you tell about the way masculinity impacts our mental health? What do you want to say about the concept? What does masculinity reveal about our inner worlds? Submissions are open from now until August 29th.

A Little About Us

For those of you new to our magazine, Anxy is a beautifully designed, bi-annual print publication about mental health, explored through a creative lens. At our core, we’re a stigma-busting community of storytellers, designers, journalists, photographers, artists, healers, and others working through mental health narratives in an open way; we understand that to share one’s story means that others with similar burdens may feel seen as well.

How To Pitch Us

Topic: Masculinity — whatever that means to you.

What We’re Looking For: Short pitches! We mean it! Send us one or two brief paragraphs to give us a general idea of what story you have in mind and why it’s important. Give us a sample of your previous work, with links to it. New, strong voices are welcome: You don’t have to have been published before, but we do need evidence of your capabilities.

And since we’re only as compelling as the narratives we amplify, we especially encourage people from communities whose perspectives haven’t been shared often enough to drop us a line.

Guidelines: Anxy stories look for the beauty in the real and the raw. They’re human to their core and rooted in the personal narrative. Keep in mind: We are aiming to shift perspectives around the way we treat mental health, so your story should address this in some shape or form. Stories can be unconventional in nature, but they should always try to start conversations and approach mental health in ways we’re not used to seeing.

While we care deeply about these issues, we’re not so self-serious that we can’t have fun too. Surprise us! We’re open to a lot.

Formats: We’re looking for personal essays, op-eds, photo essays, reported features, interviews, artwork, comic scripts, and other creative story formats from contributors around the world. We regularly publish poetry, and are particularly interested in finding short fiction for Issue 4.

Deadline: You’ll have until August 29th to submit pitches. But we want to emphasize that we’re interested in your ideas more than a “make-or-break,” lengthy, polished pitch. We want to know what you have to say about masculinity, why you should be the one to say it, and how it connects with Anxy’s mission.

Pay: Our rates are competitive with other magazines.

But before you pitch, please read up on what Anxy is looking for:

Take a look at our style and approach for our first three issues.

Pitches should be:

Relevant. Do people care about this now?

Real. Does the idea capture some part of the human experience? Does it feel true?

Original. The idea or angle should feel novel, so make sure to explain why or what about it is new.

Voice-y. Anxy is rooted in the personal narrative and the human experience, so show us you have a distinct voice and a strong point of view — and that you’re the best person to write this story.

In our first three issues we featured work from new voices, established writers, groundbreaking photographers and artists, and many more. If you want to be part of the next edition, go ahead and submit your ideas before the deadline.

Announcing Anxy №4: The Masculinity Issue — Call for Submissions was originally published in Anxy Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Adults have many opinions about teenagers, and for the most part they’re negative. Teenagers are unpredictable and mean, we say, or they’re lazy and entitled, or they’re self-involved, selfie-taking, Snapchat-addicted narcissists who don’t understand how easy they have it.

It’s easy to forget how challenging being a teenager can be, how the world seems ready to foist adult responsibilities onto you without offering any adult freedom in return. And our clichéd view of teenage angst makes it easy to dismiss the struggles that people go through as they move from youth to adulthood, easy to make the assumption that every feeling of stress or strain is merely the result of an unfortunate combination of hormones and melodrama.

But in the affluent, high-achieving communities crowded around Silicon Valley, there is one aspect of teenagers’ lives that parents treat with the utmost seriousness: their child’s acceptance to an elite (preferably Ivy League) university.

When you’re a teenager in these environments, with a family full of brilliant minds who worked their way through Stanford or MIT or Harvard, the pressure to succeed can become a driving force and a source of anxiety. The sense of competition and a desire to excel is often paired with the crushing fear that one mistake will ruin their chances irreparably.

We often think of work — and workaholism — as a problem of the adult world, and yet young people in these situations are driven so hard to achieve that they often crack. The evidence? Recurring clusters of suicides at these schools, some of which have rates five times the national average. But while each of these tragedies brings extensive media scrutiny, they also generate many more bad opinions based on clickbait headlines and deep presumptions about the motives of the kids who struggle to cope.

High school students in 2017 exist in a different environment than that of their parents and, in some cases, even their older siblings. Teenagers in the U.S., for example, grew up in the shadow of 9/11, and have never known life without the ubiquity of the internet and smartphones. They are growing up in a fundamentally different world from the one most 20-and 30-somethings did. If we want to understand what it’s like to be a teenager in a high-pressure academic environment in 2017, we must listen to the teens who are living that reality.

So that’s what we decided to do. We asked students what they really felt and to put their thoughts down and share them. So here are high school students and recent graduates from some of California’s most stressful schools, giving us their views. Some writers asked for their names to be changed, but others did not. And while we have excerpted some text from longer essays, these stories are otherwise unedited, unchanged and unvarnished. They give us all a glimpse of what it feels like to be on the inside of such a demanding, confusing environment at such a young age.

— Katie MacBride

Marley, Tamalpais High School Graduate

I was a well-behaved kid. Straight As, varsity athlete, president of a school club. Safe, marketable hobbies and no interest in drinking or drugs. I prided myself, perhaps a bit egotistically, on being “good.” In fact, I kept nearly all of my self-esteem hinged on the idea of being universally liked, even as I lost sleep, weight, and my psychological well-being to it.

At age seventeen, just barely a month into my senior year of high school, I cracked. I remember turning to my mother as we crossed through heavy fog on the Golden Gate Bridge and frowning. “I feel weird,” I said. She asked me to explain. I shook my head. I couldn’t place what “weird” meant. It meant I was sure something bad would happen if we kept going across that bridge. It meant my insides were on fire. An hour or so later, I was sitting on a park bench after throwing up in a public trash can, thoroughly convinced I was dying. I spent the next week home from school in an anxiety-induced stupor, a fog of my own clouding my room with a rapid-fire succession of pure, uncomfortable adrenaline and confused depression.

Seemingly overnight, I went from a capable person just going through a bad patch to a shaking, paranoid mess… I had never heard the word “bipolar” used outside the context of disparaging comments about an unpopular teacher’s personality, or maybe in a gritty thriller to describe a villain. To me, it may as well have meant “failure.”

Depression manifested itself first, coupled with a sudden anxiety not confined to grades and social events but whether or not I would die if I set foot outside my house. With the anxiety came a near-constant nausea, and with the depression came a curious amount of “highs” in which I felt somewhat like I had been buried in an anthill.

“I didn’t seriously consider mental health until my junior year of high school when my school district lost four high school students or recent alums to suicide.”

— Shawna

Josh, Gunn High School Graduate

For the good part of freshman and sophomore year my mental health was fine. It mostly came when I was an upperclassman, the more stressful years of high school. Since I was a social person I felt like telling people I was struggling with mental health issues would make me a taboo. I felt like people would not want to be friends with me. I felt like I couldn’t deal with school, social life, and my mental health issues, so I just tried to sweep my mental health under the rug. I tried to avoid it as much as possible.

Chloe, Gunn High School Graduate

Many of my friends and peers struggled with mental health conditions, and I became very involved in community mental health work. I spent a great deal of my time fighting for easier access to quality mental health care — there are so many barriers that prevent young people from accessing the services that they need and deserve, and I really threw myself into that work. As a result, I was constantly surrounded by psychiatrists, school counselors, social workers, and other people who were very focused on mental health. I think that being in this environment encouraged me to think a lot about my own personal wellness and what that meant to me.

Shawna, Gunn High School Graduate

I didn’t seriously consider mental health until my junior year of high school when my school district lost four high school students or recent alums to suicide.

…

My peers and I would boast about how little we slept, and none of us understood the concept of rest. I’d always keep a tab with some sort of “productive work” open on my laptop in case someone walked by while I was watching a movie or surfing Tumblr. Stress was normal to me, but I had no idea how to cope with crises. Amid this 24/7 racehorse cycle of academics, increasing family tensions, lack of sleep, insecurities about not being enough, outsiders’ perceptions of what kind of person I should be, a burdensome sense of responsibility for being the glue at home, and the aftereffects of my classmates’ deaths, I was diagnosed with depression my senior year.

Marley

Personal identity became a huge issue for me. I did not come out as gay until after I graduated, and the internal struggle of convincing myself I was simply a “late bloomer,” or confused, never really left.

…

Adults in general never quite seemed to know how to handle a kid in crisis who couldn’t be solved simply. I never felt comfortable disclosing what exactly was “wrong” with me, so I gave the blanket “I’ve been sick” excuse many times. I was afraid of appearing weak in front of figures of authority.

Josh

For me, I believe that some of my stress came from friends, family, and school. Other than that, I found that instead of it being something or someone else impacting my mental health, it was internal. I discovered that my poor mental health came from self-image problems. I felt like I had not reached my full potential in multiple areas of my life. I was not the best me I could be.

Chloe

By my senior year, I was student body president, editor-in-chief of the yearbook, and the leader of many community mental health initiatives. Combined with academics, this definitely wasn’t always an easy load
to bear. It was manageable most of the time, but when things went wrong and were out of my control — such as the death of a loved one or a stressful situation with family — I often struggled to take care of myself without sacrificing some of the things I was working on.

“Adults in general never quite seemed to know how to handle a kid in crisis who couldn’t be solved simply.”

— Marley

Josh

In the middle of my junior year, one of my best friends took his own life. This destroyed me. I literally cannot describe my emotions because words will not do it justice. There was a time when I felt like I could not make it. I thought that I would take my own life eventually. At one point, it was a matter of when, not if. I felt weak and felt my life was not worth anything.

Shawna

The stress and academic rigor of school set unattainable expectations of perfection. My parents started fighting a lot more once I reached high school; my relationship with my father also deteriorated over conflicts in ideology and the kind of life I should lead; pressures increased as the need to get into prestigious colleges loomed closer and closer; my body was changing and growing; friendships and relationships took on forms I hadn’t before navigated, and possibly most impactful was a classmate and childhood friend’s death by suicide in my junior year. After that, the grief and guilt from not having been closer, not having been more aware, yanked at me from all directions.

…

Typically, parents didn’t prioritize mental health in their lives, so students didn’t grow up with an understanding for its value. Silicon Valley also prides itself on being the valley of workaholics — students grow up in a culture that generally frowns upon doing things that aren’t productive. And because college was seen as the end goal, the mindset was “I’ll work now to get into college and worry about my mental health later.”

Sam, current sophomore at a high school in Silicon Valley

I think some misconceptions parents have about their high school students is that mental health struggles can’t happen to their children. They think mental health resources are important, but they don’t see it as something that their child would need. They think it always happens to someone else’s kid.

…

I worry that, despite frequent discussions in my area around the mental health stigma, there’s still many in the community who believe that mental health issues are someone else’s problem, not their own. If we look at physical health, nobody says physical health is just cancer or diabetes or pneumonia. We say physical health is also the little things — like a sore back, a cold, etc. In physical health, by making people aware of the little things, a heightened awareness of one’s physical health is developed, helping people get treatment early on to prevent the onset of more serious conditions. However, when it comes to mental health, we focus on extreme cases and stories, which develops the mindset that mental health is someone else’s problem, not our own. For example, last year, my school had a speaker come who suffered during high school with severe bipolar disorder. While I thought the speaker was amazing, I can’t help but feel that when we, as a community, talk mainly about some extreme stories, we make people believe that mental health is limited to these extreme cases.

Marley

I lost all of the self-esteem I’d built using grades, academic awards, and sports achievements. I didn’t talk to friends. I didn’t go to people’s houses. I scratched my way through classes with a variety of half-assed “zen relaxation” techniques… I divulged as little details as I could to anyone, preferring to shut myself in bathroom stalls or the dark of my room.

Shawna

An immigrant, my father would remind me every day how much he sacrificed and how hard he worked so we could have an education in the United States. Hanging out with friends, watching movies, playing music would be used as leverage to make me focus first on my grades. Anything else — mental health, physical health, relationships, faith, even family gatherings — was secondary.

…

Most of my days were spent half in class and half in my room studying. I didn’t often complain because that was just normal to me — I didn’t know any other kind of life. My peers and I all grew up with the same cultural norms of work, work, work in the Silicon Valley. But in high school, as I began to venture outside of what I knew and explore the kind of person I wanted to be, the uncertainty and insecurities that rose to the surface collided with my overwhelmingly stressful lifestyle, and I was not prepared to deal with the mental health issues they created.

…

Though my mother would often comfort me quietly during moments of distress, our family was not one that saw tears as productive or healthy. The only thing we knew how to do was get angry, be loud, and slam doors.

…

Exposure to so many suicides meant I had the means to access death, and though I felt irreparable pain and grief from losing a classmate I’d known since youth, death seemed like a way out from all that — an end to the constant sufferings of hard-hitting, never-ending waves of raw feeling. It wasn’t until I started wanting to live again that I made an effort to get help. And, unsurprisingly, it took leaving Palo Alto for me to realize I wanted to live.

Chloe

My parents often worried that I would overextend myself. However, they trusted that I knew my own limits, and encouraged me to pursue what I loved as long as I was maintaining a balanced lifestyle. Because our relationship was built on trust, I found it easy to talk to them when I was struggling — 
I knew they’d be accepting of failure or hardship, which became really important when I was having a hard time. Toward the end of my junior year I was really struggling. I was working really hard, which was usually okay, but things had started to pile up on top of my work load: My dog died, I got the flu for two weeks, my grandmother passed away, and I lost a friend to suicide. Being in crisis mode for so long was really taking a toll on my wellbeing;
it was harder for me to keep up in school, and I wasn’t sleeping or eating as well as I used to. I often felt sad and unmotivated, and eventually I asked my parents if I could start seeing a therapist. They were overwhelmingly supportive, and helped me find a therapist who was a good match for me.

Shawna

The summer after my junior year, when we experienced our second suicide cluster in five years, I attended a journalism camp at Northwestern. It was a five-week-long camp — the longest time I’d been away from home — and introduced me to a variety of friends and peers who lived different lives and were shaped by diverse experiences. The group of friends that I became closest with hadn’t grown up under the same kinds of pressures and showed me what it looked like to incorporate wellness and balance into my everyday life. We’d routinely take breaks to walk downtown for Starbucks while working, we scheduled time to go to the beach and relax, and we put off work sometimes and instead spent the night swapping stories about boys and sibling rivalries and the best Korean dramas we’d ever watched. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to go, go, go. I could just be — and that was when I felt my first taste of true freedom.

At the same time, being away from home meant that the feelings of hurt and self-criticism I’d long tried to suppress were bubbling to the surface. I spent many nights crying myself to sleep or lashing out at the people around me… When I headed back home at the end of summer, I was resolute: I needed to see a doctor. My parents, not understanding mental health, took their time warming up to the idea but tried their best to support me after I was diagnosed with depression the September of my senior year. I made appointments to see a cognitive behavioral therapist every week and began scheduling set hours every day to go to the gym.

…

Though I never would’ve thought this a year or two ago, I can honestly say I’m doing much better. Freed from the chains of self-hatred and expectations of perfection, I am a happier, healthier version of myself and can now share my experience to help others going through similar situations. It took a long, long time and ironically, a lot of work, but that work was worth so much more than any grade or achievement.

Josh

I found the courage to keep going. There are always good things to look forward to in life. Your next happiest day could be around the corner. No matter who you are, life is always valuable. Your life always matters. There will always be people around you who care. Be vocal, make your voice heard, and do not be afraid to get help.

Marley

Crouching on the floor of the bathroom, my stomach caving in, I lost much more than pounds or reputation. I lost my identity, my freedom, my peace of mind. I lost my creative spirit and my ability to love unconditionally. I am no longer ashamed of my diagnosis, but I cannot ever let myself believe that I am wholly my diagnosis, or that it can’t hurt me anymore. There are parts of me that stayed in the doctor’s office, in the bathroom stall, in the dark of my room. I can never get those parts back. What I can do is tell myself over and over again that, despite all of this, I am still me.

I hope for a better me. Someone who thinks less in absolutes, who is empathetic without regret, and who remembers they are loved. Being a child with a mental illness makes you older in many senses, but you are still a child. I was a child who thought, genuinely, that she was at the end of her life at the age of 17. I want to be an adult who forgets that pain, but I know I am not there yet. It exists within me, always. There is no ghost I can imagine quite like this, but I live with it, as others do. For now, I can only do so much as take my meds, do my work, and remind myself that there is a version of me, in the past, who does not yet know how happy she can be.

Shawna

I am not perfect. I make mistakes. I fail and I fail again. But my depression and subsequent treatment taught me that my worth isn’t defined by how much work I do or how much better I can be — it’s defined by me as I am, right here, right now. And right here, right now, I choose to define myself by my good, as a girl who loves and loves and sees the world as brimming with infinite possibilities.

If you need to talk to somebody, America’s National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1–800–273-TALK. There are more resources on page 187.

This story features in Anxy №2: The Workaholism Issue, featuring Neal Brennan, Kenneth R. Rosen, Jana Ašenbrennerová and more.

High Pressure was originally published in Anxy Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What are boundaries? How do boundaries shift over time? By culture? When we talk about self-care, identity, place? There are an infinite number of boundaries in our world that go beyond just the physical and into the personal, social, creative, emotional, and more.

Our creation of –and adherence to–boundaries shapes our lives. They sculpt our identities and enrich our inner worlds. How do we navigate nebulous boundaries? The ones we cross without even knowing it — briefly or thoroughly, with strangers or friends? Boundaries inform all our relationships, and our sense of self. Some free us personally, while others constrict us collectively. Some people see boundaries everywhere; others rarely see them at all.

We want you to get creative.

What stories can you tell about the boundaries that exist in all of our lives? What do you want to say about them? What do they reveal about our inner worlds? Submissions are open from now until February 2.

A Little About Us

For those of you new to our magazine, Anxy is a beautifully designed, bi-annual print publication about mental health, explored through a creative lens. At our core, we’re a stigma-busting community of storytellers, designers, journalists, photographers, artists, healers, and others working through mental health narratives in an open way; we understand that to share one’s story means that others with similar burdens may feel seen as well.

How To Pitch Us

Topic: Boundaries — whatever that means to you.

What We’re Looking For: Short pitches! We mean it! Send us one or two brief paragraphs to give us a general idea of what story you have in mind and why it’s important. Give us a sample of your previous work, with links to it. Note: Previous publication is not necessary. New, strong voices are welcome.

We’re only as compelling as the narratives we amplify. We especially encourage people from communities whose perspectives haven’t been shared often enough to drop us a line.

Guidelines: Anxy stories look for the beauty in the real and the raw. They’re human to their core and rooted in personal narrative, aiming to shift perspectives around the way we treat mental health. Anxy stories can be unconventional in nature, but they should start conversations and approach mental health in ways we’re not used to seeing.

While we care deeply about these issues, we’re not so self-serious that we can’t have fun too. Surprise us! We’re open to a lot.

Format: We’re looking for personal essays, op-eds, photo essays, features, interviews, artwork, and other creative story formats from contributors around the world.

Deadline: We know we’re not giving you a ton of time to put a pitch together — we’re closing our Submittable on Feb 2nd. But we want to emphasize that we’re interested in your ideas more than a “make-or-break,” lengthy, polished pitch. We want to know what you have to say about boundaries, why you should be the one to say it, and how it connects with Anxy’s mission.

Pay: We’re a small print magazine, but we’ve raised our rates to be more competitive.

But before you pitch, please read up on what Anxy is looking for:

Take a look at Issues 1 & 2 for ideas of our style and approach.

Pitches should be:

Relevant. Do people care about this now?

Real. Does the idea capture some part of the human experience? Does it feel true?

Original. The idea or angle should feel novel, so make sure to explain why or what about it is new.

Voice-y. Anxy is rooted in the personal narrative and the human experience, so show us you have a distinct voice and a strong point of view — and that you’re the best person to write this story.

In our first two issues we featured work from new voices, established writers, groundbreaking photographers and artists, and many more. If you want to be part of the next edition, go ahead and submit your ideas before the deadline.

Announcing Anxy №3: The Boundaries Issue was originally published in Anxy Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This story is featured in Issue №2 of Anxy: The Workaholism Issue, a magazine that takes a creative perspective on the inner worlds we often refuse to share.

Bound and blindfolded, my classmates were locked in tiny, ramshackle rooms below the yip-yipping of their captors. We were inside a warehouse, somewhere in the Maryland suburbs, a chorus of car alarms and howling rioters embellishing the realism of this mock-kidnapping and detainment. The sounds interstitched with strobe lights for nearly 20 minutes. All I could do was watch.

I recused myself from participating in this portion of a hostile environment training course for journalists and aid workers, in which I’d enrolled before taking reporting assignments in Iraq. Looking back months later, I wasn’t proud of abstaining from the activities at hand. But I could not shake the angst and anxiety that has been woven into me over many years, to say nothing of what it meant for me to take an assignment in a war zone thousands of miles away from my rituals of comfort.

The class was a prerequisite for reporting in war-torn Mosul, a city and battle I briefly visited in the spring as the last fighters of the Islamic State were driven out, and one I returned to this fall. Before this I had never visited the Middle East. I had never covered an ongoing conflict.

The course instructors — former combat and special forces veterans — stressed the importance of becoming a hard target. Never remain still. Never lose focus on your surroundings. Remain ever-vigilant and hyper-focused. It was not so much the course that became useful to me as what it eventually illuminated — that I had spent the past decade essentially preparing for extreme, anxiety-inducing situations. I even welcomed them.

My inconsolable need to check over my shoulder every moment, or the way I jump when someone touches me, makes sense in a country like Iraq. It’s only at home, devoid of these situations, that I haven’t conquered the hardest part of my disorientation: what to do with silence.

The instructors said nothing of my recusal and offered no signs of concern that I’d be going to a war zone ill-prepared. Though, if they had, I might have said this assignment was something I needed to do.

My anxiety had gotten to the point of damnable complacency and self-destruction that all but crippled me from social and professional aspirations. If I’d balked at the chance to cover these stories, then I might as well have given into the wretched shell of fear and isolation that controlled me forever.

Without anything to restrain the strife, the anxiety reappears in ways I’m unable to handle. Some days I shun the world, the feelings so crippling that it seems reasonable to just stay in bed. Inevitably I find myself contemplating how few people would miss me were I to vanish. During these moments, of course, my phone hardly rings, which in turn perpetuates my self-loathing, and I curl back into a ball.

I could blame the root of these feelings of worthlessness on an elementary school crush.

Co-ed dances became a thing in elementary school and I had no luck there. No one would dance with me. But one day, miraculously, someone did agree to a slow dance. I could feel the girl looking over my shoulder as we moved, waiting desperately for the song to end, after which she quickly ran away, back to her friends who surrounded her in a shield of giggles. She had won a bet. Fearing that rejection, I never danced again.

Or perhaps, I might blame my father.

He is not a commanding presence, but what he lacks in dominating appearance he makes up for with intelligence. At restaurants he meticulously corrects menus, scanning them for typos with his ballpoint pen. My mother blames him for discouraging my twin sister, Rachele, and me when we were younger, excitable, and eager to share. I’d begin telling a story by saying, “Today me and Rachele — ” and my father’s stern, low-growl of a voice would cut me short, correcting me. “Rachele and I,” he’d say, and I’d by then forgotten what I’d wanted to say.

Later still, when I was 13 years old and attending a military academy, I was often met by physical punishment. Some nights my commanding officers, only 17 themselves, made me assume a pushup position, maintaining it until I collapsed and could not feel my arms. One night, facing a wall, nose pressed against the drywall for hours before my knees buckled, one of them took a sword and shoved it into my back.

I wondered if I had invited this behavior. Perhaps they, too, knew of my worthlessness, which is how I became the obvious outlet for their misplaced aggression. Then a sock filled with pennies connected against my head, followed by darkness.

While my patterns of anxiety started young, they slithered into college life and later a master’s degree I couldn’t finish.

The thought that everyone on campus hated me for the same reasons that I hated myself — because I couldn’t formulate, vocalize, and defend an argument without becoming enraged, because I never spoke much and when I did it was only to criticize, because I couldn’t handle feedback, because why was a troubled manchild attending the Ivy League — was unbearable. That particular spiral found me standing on a southbound train platform one autumn afternoon, popping anxiety medications and contemplating what pleasant end would be met at the front of an oncoming subway car.

Thank god for writing and reporting, which helps me straighten these coils into something more manageable. My extroverted work emboldens my introverted self: it grants me brief public achievements that set me on an even keel and save me from a darkly permanent and hermetic life. Otherwise I generally prefer the solitude of my home, where my cat won’t confront me about a choice made earlier in my life. I relish the comfort of my squeaky wooden office chair, from which I know my mistakes can be discarded onto the editing room floor and swept away.

Publishing, seeing my name in print or pixels, allows me some self-actualization. I celebrate at each proper paycheck because they mean, in some small way, that I had been somewhere. Someone saw me. I’m not worthless, and neither are the stories I write. The checks are my hedge against the twitch of anxiety that tells me to stay indoors and placate my inherent worries with solitude.

It’s this need to push myself out into the open that’s caused me, for example, to chaperone a man who tried to mug me at gunpoint in Georgia. He needed a lift to his girlfriend’s house and since I didn’t have any cash, I offered him a ride and a chance to tell me his story. This is also how, as one of my early beat reporting assignments, I landed in Alaska on a damp spring evening after flying into the airport sideways and barely landing, my excitement pounding through my chest.

It is why I take on so many reporting assignments, because to be anything other than busy is to welcome unease, becoming anxious in stagnation.

When I arrived in Iraq I knew the downtime would be the most difficult.

The Tigris River stood to my right as we moved closer to the checkpoint ahead. Dark clouds from rubbish fires surrounded the car in which I was alone with two men I hardly knew and could hardly understand because I did not speak Kurdish. I felt eclipsed by my most irrational fears. We were at a standstill not far outside the liberated city of Mosul, sure, but what I worried about most was whether or not I would return home with the stories I set out to write.

I also worried about my colleagues based here, if they thought less of me for having parachuted into their country without knowing the nuances of the people or situation here. I fretted that the concierge at my one of my hotels in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region in Northern Iraq, despised me for asking him to watch my stuff while I visited the frontline for a few days. I stewed in the knowledge that nearly 6,000 miles could not divorce me from my most basic of worries: everything.

I tried everything to keep from thinking I was failing at reporting, failing at gathering enough information for the story. When finally we reached an area from where I could make a phone call, I shared some of my reporting concerns with my editor, a dear friend.

She told me to trust myself, that I’d done this before, and that I should go in whatever direction the story took me. I like to think she knew what I did: focusing elsewhere was the only way to move forward. Pointing the lens outward would allow me to heal my inner disruption.

It is easy to get lost in this workaday craze. It is easy to become swallowed by your passion. The alternative is to be gobbled up by something more smothering, like anxiety.

But I’ve slowly come to learn that some days can be spent in bed. Not every day has to be striking, or leading toward something that helps quell an existential dread.

In fact, please don’t let every day be striking.

It’d be too much.

This story features in Anxy №2: The Workaholism Issue, featuring Neal Brennan, Amanda Rosenberg, Jana Ašenbrennerová and more.

Every Day Was Striking was originally published in Anxy Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s been more than a year since Anxy started its journey, back in October 2016. We couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished between then and now. What started as a personal passion project has—thanks to the support and enthusiasm of readers—become a publication with global reach that can get noticed. That means a lot to us: It means that Anxy has a real chance at breaking the barriers that stigmatize mental health, and that it can do so across borders and cultures. The positive reception has been encouraging, and I want to make sure we build on that momentum.

So here’s our second issue.

This time it’s about workaholism. We’re exploring the subject of work, specifically the edges between working hard and working compulsively. How do we know when we are pushing ourselves too far? What’s happening underneath the surface when, knowing we should stop, we feel compelled to keep going? What happens when we have no other choice?

If you want to know why we’re doing this, take a look at a Q&A I did to mark the release with our friends at It’s Nice That.

Anxy №2 launches publicly today, and we’re starting the process of sending out the magazine to our growing list of subscribers all around the world. (It’s easy to get the second issue or subscribe.)

There are so many pieces we could tell you about, and we’re proud of them all in different ways — but our big interview is with the comedian Neal Brennan. Last year he made a major breakthrough by producing this amazing show and Netflix special called 3 Mics, where he mixes straight-up joke routine with this amazing, raw confessional material about his own life. He spoke to Zoneil Maharaj, a writer and editor from Las Vegas, about his struggles with depression, and how work and mental health interact for him. We coupled that with work by An Rong Xu, a wonderful Chinese-American photographer, who followed Brennan around to see what his life is like. You really get the sense of how hard he actually works to make this all happen in the portraits he took.

Another there’s a great piece by Laura Reagan, a therapist based in Baltimore who talks about how our traumas can bring themselves back to life at work, including her own experience of a workplace shooting. Not everybody’s story is so dramatic of course, but we all bring all this baggage with us to work — family relationships, previous jobs, friendships — and we often don’t understand how issues at work like uncertainty or bullying can really bring that stuff back to life. The accompanying illustrations by Tokyo’s Hisashi Okawa have this kind of haunted, universal quality that we thought was a great match.

One of the most important stories in the magazine for us explores the way teens at some of the Bay Area’s most intense schools think about life. The suicide rates in Silicon Valley schools are the highest in America, and the pressure cooker atmosphere really creates incredibly high expectations, a workaholic culture, and leads to a lot of anguish. But even though there’s been a lot of coverage of the issue, it’s always a reporter telling you about the teens — you never really get a chance to listen to them.

We think that those teenagers get a pretty raw deal — every generation seems to get labelled as lazy, entitled, and thoughtless by those who came before them. So we asked a group of young people who have endured these difficult situations to write unvarnished accounts of their experiences, so that we could actually hear them say what they think… not just tell them what we believe. We coupled it with artwork produced by a teenage artist in London, a fantastic young collage-maker called Jao San Pedro. The whole package is really eye-opening.

Anyway, you can see it all for yourself by subscribing. When you have a chance, please tell other people about what we’re doing, and tell us what you think by email, social media or by replying to this message.

As always, we thank our family and friends, contributors and subscribers, as well as all the readers and fans who helped make this issue possible. I also want to express endless gratitude to the members our team. Even though every day can present a new challenge, with your support, every challenge is a new adventure.

Thank you.

— Indhira Rojas

What’s the difference between working hard and working compulsively? was originally published in Anxy Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ask Katie: Should I Avoid Desserts With Alcohol In Them?

And what do I do about champagne toasts?

Dear Katie,

Should people who completely abstain from alcohol cook with wine? Should they avoid desserts that have alcohol in them (e.g., bananas foster)? I was recently at a wedding with many sober people, and some took tiny sips of champagne for the toast. How strict do people have to be?

From,

Little Sipper

Dear Little Sipper,

This is a really interesting question, and the answer is going to be slightly different for each person. Here’s the deal for me: I’m fine eating something that has been cooked with alcohol. For the most part (and certainly for my concerns), the alcohol cooks out, so I don’t worry about it. That said, if I were making food at home, I would find a substitute for alcohol if the recipe called for it. Why the difference? I don’t trust myself with a bottle of anything alcoholic. If a sauce called for wine, for example, I could very easily see myself pouring some of the wine in the sauce but then pouring all the rest of the wine down my throat. I even buy alcohol-free mouthwash, because towards the end of my drinking I would wake up with shaking hands from alcohol withdrawal. If I didn’t have any alcohol left in the house, I would drink Listerine to stop the shaking.

It’s worth noting that I have accidentally consumed alcohol in sobriety. I had some cough medicine that I thought was sans alcohol but wasn’t and accidentally picked up an Irish coffee instead of my regular coffee. In both cases, I had a sip and knew immediately that the thing I was drinking was not the thing I was supposed to be drinking. And in both cases, I was supremely freaked out. I didn’t keep drinking it and I got over my freaked out feelings pretty quickly, but I wouldn’t sign up for the experience again. Because for me, if I can’t drink all the alcohol, I shouldn’t drink any of the alcohol. So while your sober friends may have been fine with a sip of champagne, that is not something I, or many others, could do in a million years.

And while it is, to some extent, an individual thing, I would urge anyone reading this who is struggling with alcoholism or who is newly in recovery to abstain completely. I’m glad that I had built up five or six years of sobriety before my accidental sips happened. In early sobriety, everything is new and raw and uncomfortable and something that might only be unnerving five years down the road can throw you off completely with just a couple of weeks under your belt.

Quitting drinking was very hard. It was absolutely the best thing I could have done for myself and my life, but it was difficult. I really, really, really don’t want to have to do it again. So if that means I toast with sparkling apple juice instead of champagne, so be it. At least I’ll remember the wedding.

~Katie

Every other week I’ll answer one question posed by Anxy readers, based on my experience. This isn’t meant to diagnose or provide medical advice — that responsibility lies with physicians. The author is not a licensed medical professional; if you’re struggling, please reach out to somebody who can help.

Send questions to katie@anxymag.com with “Ask Katie” in the subject. By sending us an email, you are agreeing to let Anxy publish its contents. Messages may be edited for length and clarity.

Ask Katie: Should I Avoid Desserts With Alcohol In? was originally published in Anxy Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For many, the holidays can serve as a chance for those living in different parts of the world to gather joyfully with loved ones. Large feasts with friends and family provide an opportunity to reflect on the year that’s passed. For many others, however, occasions such as Thanksgiving can be depressing and stressful.

For some this comes from the often gendered physical and emotional labor of the festivities themselves. (Who’s responsible for cooking and cleaning for a double-digit number of people?) For others, it’s the dread of confronting a parent who voted differently, or a racist uncle, or an aunt who won’t stop bringing attention to your weight gain. Whatever it is, it doesn’t feel good. Throw in the likely presence of alcohol, and an uncomfortable scenario can easily trigger a fight-or-flight response.

If you’re anticipating a difficult encounter, then try taking a few minutes now (or at some point before it happens) to reflect on your boundaries. Write them down. If your family’s receptive, talk to them beforehand about topics you’d rather they didn’t bring up, whether it’s an ex or your job. If they’re not receptive, maintaining perspective when the inevitable happens is key to not spiraling. Knowing your limits better prepares you to walk away from a confrontation or criticism that can linger and affect your mental health. Don’t hesitate to excuse yourself from the table for a brief period of time. Try not to run off in a huff. Explain what you’re doing and why, and then do it. Go outside and take a walk. Play with any children who happen to be running around. Pursue whatever non-harmful self-care looks like for you in that moment, and try to maintain a space in your heart for forgiveness should those around you apologize for their actions.

The holidays may never be entirely stress-free, but they can be more fulfilling by taking precautions, communicating when possible… and knowing yourself.

On Surviving The Holidays was originally published in Anxy Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.