Anxiety May Not Be Curable, But There is Reason For Hope
Nowhere in the following thousand words is there a remedy for anxiety. I would love, for my sake and yours, to be in a position to offer a magic bullet that would allow for all of us to enjoy a social setting that isn’t followed by a day of rumination. Or that would give my fingernails a chance to grow back.
But this is not that essay.
I write this essay only to say, I too feel the inexplicable fears that you feel. I too fight the battle against endless ruminations. I too become hopelessly lost in my own guilt, embarrassment, and regret over things that have either never happened or happened but no one noticed.
So, while anxiety undeniably sucks, you can perhaps find solace in knowing that you are not the only one experiencing its suckiness.
What has surprised me about my own anxiety is that it has taken so long to pull back the curtain of my mental Oz and identify it by name. It is only now, toward the end of my twenties, that I can look backward in time and see the thread that anxiety has spun throughout my life.
Though I never knew it, anxiety’s invisible hands have been in the background shaping me in significant ways since I was a child. It is only now that I realize that perhaps my paralyzing fear of the school lunchroom and its social dynamics was more than just adolescent angst. That to pin the love and acceptance of my parents, coaches, peers, and self-worth as a person on every tennis match was a bit more than me just being hard on myself. That, maybe, feeling as though every high school test required walking a tightrope above a dark abyss where unimaginable consequences made their home was not simply the nerves experienced by someone who wanted to do well.
But I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s when anxiety (and mental health in general) wasn’t discussed. There were no memes to let you know that others battled the same incessant voice of doubt, fear, and despair that you did. No, back then you were an army of one, battling a relentless enemy that existed only in the ether of thought and attacked only from the inside.
As a child, adolescent, and teenager, the world is a strange place. The combination of nearly every experience being new while simultaneously being blasted with hormones makes irrationality rationale. Or at least, it makes irrationality easier to explain.
Fast-forward to adulthood, and anxiety becomes stranger, more paradoxical, as the world becomes more normal. As an adult, the emotions that anxiety conjures up feel further removed from the rest of life. One moment, you are a highly-functioning adult, having innocuous adult thoughts and making use of adult rationality. Then, often in the very next moment, you find yourself at home after an ordinary day, and that flub on a work assignment or that one comment you made to the girl you are seeing keeps scrolling past the ticker tape of your mind. And the consequences begin to sprout into a thousand potential, and always negative, realities. Suddenly, you are pacing your apartment, biting your nails, lost watching a thousand dramas in your mind that, while completely removed from reality, feel unmistakably real.
It doesn’t take long before there is no doubt in your mind that tomorrow you will be called into your boss’s office and asked to explain your actions. Or your partner is going to leave you. Or you are not who you thought you were. Aided by a childlike imagination mixed with adult consequences, the snowball begins to roll and everything about your life as it was just moments before is called into question.
For those of us with anxiety, it can feel that our confidence, self-identity, purpose, and sense of place is built not of stone, but of toothpicks. Sure, the tower of our confidence can stretch towards the sky with every personal success in life. So too can our self-identity and purpose. But it takes only the lightest breeze of a less-than-perfect interaction with a colleague, a slight setback, or doing anything less than achieving beyond any reasonable expectations, to have it all come crashing down.
Perhaps anxiety’s most insidious impulse, and the one hardest to understand for those on the outside, is its need to search for causes of worry at times when none voluntarily present themselves. This is the difference between anxiety and nervousness. Being nervous (to a reasonable degree) before speaking publicly isn’t anxiety. It is completely normal and rational. Anxiety, however, leaves you lying awake at night with the certainty of being fired mere hours after giving a presentation that earned applause and praise. It is the fear of a boyfriend or girlfriend leaving when the relationship has never been better. It is feeling like your life in shambles when, by any and all metrics, it has never been better.
The emotion of fear is real in these moments. Your imagination becomes reality. Anxiety is the unsuperpower to live through the visceral experience of a thousand misfortunes in an hour.
There is no reason to compare the two, but anxiety differs from hardship in an important way that is worth noting. No one enjoys life’s more difficult moments. But what hardship offers that anxiety does not is hope for improvement. When you are at the bottom, it takes only a skyward glance to imagine a life improved. The challenges you face in hardship are difficult, but concrete. Though difficult in its own right, steps can be made to make a bad situation better. There is reason to believe things can and will improve.
But what do you do when you feel the walls closing in from atop one of life’s peaks? What do you do when life is peachy, yet you still can’t help but fidget and worry and stress? In what direction do you look for hope when your hardships only exist in your mind? What could break a soul more effectively, what could feel more helpless, than misery amidst having everything you could ask for?
While the experience of battling the psychological boogeyman can feel dire, there is reason for hope. I don’t believe you cure anxiety. And, even if you could, I am not sure you would want to. I know from my own experience that, while anxiety has made certain aspects of my life more challenging, I also owe anxiety for much of who I am.
In its more manageable doses, anxiety has pushed me to work harder. It forces me to consider my interactions with others more carefully. It is what drives me to (try) to exceed expectations in relationships and my career. It has been the motivation for considering big decisions with the thought and care that big decisions deserve. It is the source of my need to reflect on my life, my identity, and my sense of purpose.
It is possible that, like myself, you have mistakenly spent your effort in trying to remove anxiety completely. Because, while a life with no anxiety at all may seem ideal, to achieve such a state would also mean removing a critical agent that drives some of our very best characteristics as people.
Anxiety, then, is not a cancer of the mind, hard as it may try to present itself as such. Maybe our efforts are better spent trying to tame anxiety. To see it not as a cancer, but more akin to owning a pet lion that must be tamed.
In trying to tame it, we will undoubtedly suffer scratches across the legs and playful bites that leave teeth marks peppered across our arms from time to time. And while it will always pose something of a threat, vigilance in our efforts to tame it’s worst impulses can allow us to enjoy the fruits of anxiety — the drive, consciousnesses, and thoughtfulness it inspires — while mitigating its worst consequences.
In resisting the urge to remove it, in accepting that scratched arms are not only inevitable but understandable, we can find the hope for victory in a battle that otherwise seems so unwinnable.
