week 23
failure to control my anxiety
I don’t know why my anxiety often spikes just when things start to calm down, except that I probably do, actually: I am more alone with my thoughts (which I do always want more of, but can sometimes dredge up anxiety), and the pressure I put on myself to spend my newly freed time making things and being productive in the arenas I want to find success in. Of course, anxiety somehow always keeps me from starting to go back into creation mode… I know that as soon as I’m creating, my anxiety will dissolve, but anxiety can pin me to my seat and trap me in my mind and suddenly days and weeks go by and I do not have the creative output I’d wished.
I can easily get stuck in the “how” of things, and sit with my analytical, critical mind thinking that I need to hustle and work harder and make ridiculously long to do lists with items I can start gunning down one by one on my path to achieving. While I imagine the types of tasks that would be on my long to do lists (and sometimes even get as far as writing the lists), I always find myself hit with a wave a paralysis, which I was forcefully hit with this week.
As I bemoaned, barated, wrestled and pleaded with anxiety, it only grew stronger and I only felt more despair that the hours and days of my summer are dwindling and I’m not going to have much to “show for it.”
Then, I decided to surrender for the moment to anxiety, whether the moment would last another hour, day, week, or the rest of the summer (I hoped not). And after surrendering, I decided to find out what Martha Beck would have to say about anxiety, because I’m on a huge Martha Beck kick right now.
Martha said something to me (well, to her podcast listeners, which now includes me): “If we over-villainize our anxiety, we don’t understand that it can be a friend and ally.” She understands and commiserates with us anxious people, saying she has always been anxious, but has never found it particularly unusual. Instead of finding ways to make it go away, she had “come to think of it as kind of a homing device. And I still think it’s a homing device. …I really think that you probably can’t go through an awakening experience without encountering a significant amount of anxiety.” So instead of trying to battle her anxiety, she started speaking to it like a friend, saying things to it when it started spiraling like: “Let me give that [what anxiety was telling her] some serious thought,” and have a dialogue with it. In deciding to look at what frightened her versus what didn’t, she noticed that when she believed certain things like “I need to succeed in the pyramid of power that is society in order to feel better,” her anxiety went “absolutely crazy.” Then when something came up that was odd like, “learn Chinese,” she would follow it like a “migratory animal.” Then she gives us a secret, urging us to imagine our anxiety as a migratory animal: “It is key to see our anxiety as 1. wild and 2. as a homing device that is in-built.”
Finally, she reiterates the beauty of anxiety. “Another thing that anxiety will tell you all the time is that ‘I will not let you rest until you are at peace.’ What a gift! Something that will not let us get complacent and stagnant, will not LET us rest until we get to peace is… a miraculous friend! …The restlessness that anxiety makes us feel has a purpose!” Martha Beck has singlehandedly and immediately transformed my view of anxiety from a necessary biological function we are trying to override to a beautiful and incredibly helpful gift and lifeline.
In failing to conquer my anxiety through bemoaning and barating, I found great peace in befriending it. And that helped me to start living in the present and enjoy some creative play time. Until we meet again, Wild Anxiety. Don’t be a stranger. Thank you Martha Beck, for your wisdom yet again.
(Really, this post should just be links to Martha Beck’s genius, so here you go: The Gathering Room, “Anxiety as a Path to Enlightenment” )
Go watch this if you want to be relieved of your anxiety… And even rejoice in it! Here’s to another week of failing, with our helpful friend Anxiety.