In today’s world if you don’t suffer from anxiety are you even a part of the human experience? During Covid, especially, I became aware to what extent the diagnosis of “anxiety” had become widespread and a defining feature of the Millennial generation. Everyone I know was on some form of anti-anxiety medication or seeing a therapist for crippling, work-impairing consternation. It made me question what was wrong with the world that all of these smart and savvy individuals went through significant experiences where it was all too much for them. It also made me question if maybe the problem is in the diagnosis itself, more specifically if labeling a number of symptoms as “anxiety” might be the root of it all. I won’t bore you with my thoughts on psychology and diagnoses. If you feel like discussing this, please feel free to send me an e-mail or DM me on Instagram. I will, however, comment on the problem of what happens when a diagnosis becomes trendy, as with the case of anxiety.
When I was sick, I discovered the depths to which a human mind can go in perpetuating the fear state. I discovered that, given the freedom to do so, an idle mind can spin an endless amount of trauma-inducing tales and worst-case scenario stories. I discovered that, if you do not have a tether, if you are not grounded in something, you can spin out.
During a regular day, in the thick of it, my thought process (or what I am willing to share with you of my thought process) would go something like this:
I need to try and wake my mother up to get breakfast ready, but if I wake her, she will be angry and her anger will hurt me, so it’s better to wait until she wakes up naturally. I spend maybe one minute waiting. No, I can’t take this, I will wake her so we can get the day started. But if she wakes up, she’s going to ask me what I want to eat, so I need to look inwards and discover what the best thing for my body is— not in the current moment— but in maybe 30 min, as it will take her some time to prepare the food. But what if my dad wakes up first? Then, if he’s preparing the food, my mom will have to feed me, so the mixture of food would be different. So, instead of oatmeal, I’ll have eggs. Okay, that’s my answer. Eggs. My mom wakes up. Damn, my mom knows how to make the oatmeal, maybe I should have oatmeal instead. What does my body want in this minute? Should I add a few things in case it takes her too long or something goes wrong and I need extra fuel later? Okay, I won’t eat eggs. I’ll have oatmeal and dates and a tea. My mom gets back to me saying we have no dates, so I root through my entire rolodex of all the foods we have that might satisfy the craving I have in this moment and possibly the next moment. I decide on almonds and an apple. My dad wakes up. He says he’s the one who will fix breakfast. Fuck that means that I can’t have oatmeal and I have to have eggs instead. What food will go with eggs to give me the absolute fullest amount of nutrition I can get for this time? Tomatoes? Ful? Cucumbers? My dad always takes longer to fix breakfast so I will need more food to sustain my energy. Oatmeal and almonds and apples are a better combo than ful and tomatoes. Maybe I will ask my mom to make the breakfast. But she hasn’t had her coffee yet, so she will be cranky until she gets it. Okay eggs. Eggs and ….something.
You get the drift. To say that I became obsessed with the little things is an understatement. Every action and decision I made was preluded by 100 hours of thinking, and if something did not go exactly the way I planned or had anticipated I would either be stunned into inaction or have to course-correct immediately, often leading to more overthinking. The simplest decisions, such as whether or not to drink water or tea, were overthought and overanalyzed. I felt like everything I was doing was BIG and that if I did not pick the exact perfect combination of variables, I would never get there. There being some form of enlightenment, or whatever. It was a scary, never-ending state and most importantly, it felt like it was totally beyond my control. There were physical symptoms as well, but in the gumbo that was my physical symptoms they were kind of hard to distinguish. So, when I hear of people who say they are not able to finish a paper because it “gives them anxiety” or who do not respond to their friends’ text messages because it somehow makes them “more anxious”, I wonder if it is the same type of anxiety I experienced while I was sick. If it is this heavy, petrifying feeling that every single thing you do, every decision you make, will somehow be the wrong one?
The first time I was actually “diagnosed” with anxiety was after a night of insomnia and internal turmoil that ended up with me screaming at my mom and my grandma every time they came near me. They got worried and sought help from a professional, having noticed that my stress levels had dramatically increased and that my behaviour had gotten weirder and weirder as the months went by. I wasn’t myself, they claimed. I remember the night of sleeplessness and tossing and turning that preluded my examination by the psychiatrist. I had thought that something much more extreme was going on in my body, that I was sick or something (which I did turn out to be), so when the therapist told me I had anxiety, I wanted to laugh. Anxiety wasn’t a serious thing, I remember thinking. She put me on some pills that I was really against taking and made me come up with a goal plan of what I hoped to get out of treatment. I remember thinking I did not need treatment, definitely not in this archaic way that did not acknowledge energy or our energetic system at all. For the record, I am not a big believer in medication. I do not believe that medicine heals you from the inside or that by taking a drug I can “cure” an ailment. That is not to say that I don’t believe medicine works and can save lives (it definitely aided in saving my life), I just don’t think it should be a way of life. At the time, I believed that the root cause of most ailments lay in our thinking patterns. That you attract what you wish to receive and therefore healing, real healing, can only come from changing your thinking patterns. Suffice it to say that this worldview brought me a lot of suffering and grief and if anything exacerbated my “anxiety”. What happened then was a thoroughly unscripted downwards spiral, wherein a physical inflammation of the brain (we discovered that this was what was wrong with me) became mixed with a persistent life-or-death feeling that permeated my every waking moment (what the doctor had called “anxiety”). I do not clearly remember my cause and effect thinking patterns during that time, but I am told, by my family, by my friends, that I was thoroughly unreasonable and scared all of the time. While I still— to this day— feel uncomfortable using the word, I have garnered respect for what anxiety can do to you and how bad it can get if you are unable to control it.
My problem with anxiety, with the way the word is currently used, is twofold: 1) it is treated as a debilitating “psychological illness” (for lack of a better term), making all casual uses of the word anxiety degrading or insensitive, 2) it is a mentally debilitating “illness”, in some cases, and therefore should not be treated lightly or used haphazardly. In the first instance people are no longer allowed to say they are anxious without implying serious emotional struggles. What was once a string of fear-based thoughts is now an admission of social incapability and/or a dependency on Xanax. In the second, a severe psychological impairment is often misused or unappreciated for what it is for lack of proper education. It is possible that 1 and 2 are essentially the same thing. What I meant to say is this: with the newly widespread diagnosis of anxiety, whether self-diagnosed or diagnosed by an expert, and the en-vogueness of the “condition”, many things get lost in translation. People with proper anxiety, the kind that impacts your physical health and really debilitates you, tend to be treated with jest, as anxiety is now everybody’s affliction and so theirs cannot be more serious. Opposingly, people without anxiety, or without life-altering anxiety, are often thrown the comment of “maybe you have anxiety” because they couldn’t handle a social function today or because their phone ringing gets on their nerves. The range of what falls under “anxiety” or what is perceived to fall under anxiety in our cultural discourse is baffling to me. Furthermore, it doesn’t seem to be getting better.
I know a girl who has been struggling with anxiety for years. At least, that is what both she and her therapist have agreed upon. What started out as moderately crippling thoughts and tendencies has evolved into a whole way of life. She avoids certain places or people because they “trigger her anxiety”, she has given up her previous love of film because some movies enervate her, and she won’t let anyone new get close to her out of fear that she is too “fragile” and “can’t handle a relationship”. I know what the cool thing to say and do is. You should respect where a person is at and advise them to “work on their problems” “with a professional”. But the more I talk to her, the more I am realizing that with some people, the diagnosis becomes them. They do not want to see their way out of it. What started out as a series of new, perhaps overwhelming, feature, turns into a— capital S –State of Being.
Okay, I did it. I said I wouldn’t talk about the diagnosis thing, but I did it anyway. Why is it, that when we are diagnosed with something, particularly something mental-emotional, we think it must be this way forever?
Why is it “asl I have anxiety”, instead of “asl I have anxiety now”?
Why is it “I suffer from depression”, instead of “I am having a depressive episode” or “I am not feeling my best at the moment”?
Why is it “I am suicidal”, instead of “I’ve been having suicidal thoughts”?
Why do many of us think that a diagnosis becomes a part of our makeup? That it is something in us, and not something we are going through at the moment? That this set of symptoms in any way defines or explains us? Do we all inherently want to feel broken or flawed?
I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine about her ADHD. She had been told by her therapist a few months previously that she suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I am unclear if this is something she is supposed to have developed later in life, or if her therapist believes she has always been this way. Disclaimer/ side note: you do not want to hear my thoughts on ADHD diagnoses, especially in North America. Anyways, I started asking her in what ways she felt that this ADHD manifested in her life, wanting to understand what was going on and how it was holding her back. But most of the answers she gave me were… completely normal (at least what I have experienced to be normal). The more we talked, the less grounded in her diagnosis she became, and yet it was clear to me that, on some level, this diagnosis had brought her comfort. She was already adopting it, as if it was a part of her.
What makes some of us shy away from putting a label on something, while others embrace it, even find themselves that way? Is there a “right” way to deal with a problem and a “wrong” way? If we constantly believe there is something wrong with us, can we ever really be cured?
This business with anxiety has got me torn. I can see the future in which millions of perfectly fine human beings are being told to go on anti-anxiety medication, avoid their triggers and cut out whatever stresses them out. And yet, also, I must acknowledge that life is stressful and not everyone has the proper tools or the proper knowledge to cope with that stress in a healthy way. Sometimes we need help. So, adopt the diagnosis or don’t adopt it, do what works for you—as long as it is healing you, as long as it is growing you, as long as it is moving you towards love.
Personally, I never want to be reduced to a word. There are forever 12734724929041 different factors working on us. On our bodies, on our minds, on our souls. To believe that we are one way, and cannot be a different way the next moment, is – for me—to limit the unlimitable.
Yes, you may have anxiety now, yes you may a more anxious person in general, but that doesn’t mean that you will be this way forever or that your anxiety in any way sums you up. That doesn’t mean that tomorrow, you may not go through a life-changing experience that alters you and allows you to overcome it. That doesn’t mean you are stuck.
Trying not to be anxiously yours,
Girl With One Earring
Some backstory about the photo selection: Living in New York was my first cognizant experience with what it means to feel really anxious. I recall the flashing lights, the maze that is the subway, the feeling that people are going 100 miles an hour and the non-stop sirens and car horns. This picture does not accurately represent the feeling because it was taken from Brooklyn- my safe haven at the time. But maybe, that is the most defining thing about anxiety: being in the space while also trying to create safety.
