(Early this year, I bookmarked what I felt were pertinent and remarkable pages in FIRST WE MAKE THE BEAST BEAUTIFUL. I'm only just typing up those bookmarked pages now. I no longer keep a paper journal, so I can't type stuff out and glue it in, the way I used to back in the 90's, when I had cheap journals, and little money, and no way to keep the poems of Marge Piercy and book excerpts from Robert Fulghum, except by this method. I certainly couldn't afford the books they came from. Now, I can afford the books, but unless I'm going to reread a book numerous times, it no longer earns a spot on my bookshelves. Thus, this method. I can refer back to pertinent points without having yet another thing to dust.)
When I was four, before starting school, I'd watch that kids' show with the puppet Mr Squiggle, the 'man from the moon' who'd come visit each afternoon from one of his space walks. I'd sit with my brother Ben in front of the telly with an orange plastic cup of sultanas and peanuts and we'd wait for him to come on. I'd make 'sultana burgers', squishing the dried fruit between two halves of a peanut, and nibble them slowly.
Strung up and jangly, Mr Squiggle emerged from his tin spacecraft and would transform scribbles provided by viewers at home into funny pictures with his pencil nose.
There was also Miss Jane, who was a real life human and forever patient and calm in the face of Mr Squiggle's nervous antics. Mostly Miss Jane was there to gently pull Mr Squiggle into line.
'Miss Jane, Miss Jane, hold my hand!' Midway through one of his drawings Mr Squiggle would get too excited for this world and start to float off into space. 'Spacewalk time, Miss Jane, spacewalk time,' he'd say with the urgency of a little boy needing the toilet.
To my five-year-old mind, Miss Jane was a warm doona that envelopes you when you're home sick from school on a wet day. She'd never roll her eyes or get exasperated. She'd just gently reach up as Mr Squiggle jangled out of shot, and grasp his little puppet ankle, pulling him back down to earth.
'Sorry, Miss Jane. Thankyou, Miss Jane,' he'd mutter. 'What would I do without you, Miss Jane.'
It strikes me how much I would love to have a Miss Jane in my life. A good deal of my frenetic A-type female friends who are always running out the door with several handbags and multiple to-do lists have partnered with Miss Janes - rock-solid, unflappable men who call out from the couch, 'I'll just be here when you get home'. They complement each other wonderfully. The kite and the kite holder.
But when you've got a mood disorder it's often different. This is the hoary deal - when you have a mood disorder, few people are heavy enough and patient enough to anchor your ups and downs. And if you're high-functioning in your anxiety, there are not many men (or women) out there who will actually take the kite string off you in the first place. And I do wonder if it's grossly unfair to ever expect them to be able to. I've often expected this of my partners. The expectation was too high for both of us, with all of them.
If you're truly going to live fully and honestly you have to learn to be your own Miss Jane to your jumpy Mr Squiggle. That's just the deal.
"And I do this thing where I twist a special spinner ring when I'm uncomfortable and repeat a mantra: 'Choose discomfort over resentment'.
Freud believed anxiety attunes us not just to external threats (charging rhinos, dodgy people in alleyways, off milk) but to internal threats and the need for growth. The discomfort Brown mentions brings this growth perhaps. Anxiety is a sign we need to move and change our lives.
"You've got to just sit in it, sit in it, sit in it," Brown told me. (She also stopped eating sugar and gave up caffeine to help her deal with her anxiety.)
How does one sit in anxious pain as a matter of course? I mean, we often hear this kind of thing said, but what does it actually look like on an average Tuesday when you have the life blahs and you really don't have any tolerance for anything that sounds like it comes with a pack of angel cards?
We can sit with it by talking to it. Hello there, old friend, you're a bit needy today. Tell me about it. Yep, you're rage-y today. You're lodged just under my solar plexus.
We can feel into the physical discomfort and find it interesting to observe. I watch the tension build in my jaw, in my neck and in my right hip.
I let myself cry from the loneliness of it all.
We can watch ourselves as we try to drown out the discomfort with a handful of corn chips or chocolate or raw oats. We can acknowledge what we're doing. I'm not a slovenly food addict. I'm just shoving food on top of my anxiety.
We can let ourselves be wrong.
...We can waste a bit of time. Oh goodness, this is just the WORST for us anxious folk - the feeling that anxiety is wasting our lives away. I should be doing productive things! I should be efficient! I shouldn't be lolling about all numb and stunned on the bedroom floor in a foetal position! Life is slipping by! Friends' kids are turning into full-grown humans and overtaking me. No. Stop. Let the time pass with seemingly nothing productive happening. The anxiety is important. It means something is in fact happening.
Monachopsis: (noun) The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach - lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognise the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you'd be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.
- The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
How to make peace with all this? I have to live on this planet with other humans; and I can't keep running. Wherever I go, there I am. So, too, the humming air-con units. And the other humans.
...'You keep moving. But it hasn't worked for you. The irritation has just followed you. The problem has to be healed and can only be done when it's in front of you.'
...So I stayed. I sat in the grimness.
When I lived up at the beaches north of Sydney there was this old guy, Bill, who came down to the beach every morning with a butter knife and a plastic bag. He'd sit cross-legged on the grass between the beach and the carpark where the well-heeled locals left their black Range Rovers and Ferraris. Bill was not of the well-heeled set. Nor was he someone you'd describe as intellectually compromised. At all. I stopped one day and asked what he was doing. Sitting in the glorious morning sun, he looked up with a big gentle smile and explained he was methodically extracting a particular weed not local to the area, root by root. It seemed a thankless and endless task. Why did he do it, I asked. 'It makes me happy,' he said, like it should be obvious.
Bill remains an inspiration for me. I refer to him often. He pays no heed to what 'other people' find meaningful or joy-creating. He's worked out what takes him to that place. It's whimsical. It's free.
I generally find that anxious people spend a lot of their lives trying to have fun doing stuff that other people find enjoyable. Things like hens' days, doing big group brunches on Sundays with way too much Hollandaise sauce involved, lying by swimming pools, Yum Cha, the races. The point is to recognise that we do this - defer to others' notions of fun. And that this is probably because we struggle with choice. And to then try to play around with finding stuff that floats your boat. And, no doubt, to then realise that your stuff could be a little weird or unique.
I realise this is a bit weird, but I started working on this - finding out what I liked doing - by signing up to RSVP.com about five years ago for the express purpose of going through the process of filling out the questionnaires that ask you what you like to read, how you like spending weekends and what kind of person you'd like to love you.
It did get me focussed on acknowledging that I simply don't like doing a lot of what other people like doing. And over time, I got more and more okay with, and less and less anxious about, this.
David Brooks feels deeply that the endpoint of the anxious journey is the acquiring of character.Writing about the world's greatest thinkers and leader who pass through suffering before arriving at their significant position in history in the New York Times, he suggests 'Many people don't come out healed; they come out different.'
I rather love this line. It suggests a subtle transformation or perspective shift, but one that's perfectly pitched for showing you the truth of life. For me I didn't come out healed, I emerged from that touch-and-go Thursday with a calm knowing. A connection. A full, deep sense of the Something Else. A weather vane at my core for what mattered. I also emerged knowing this was enough. It was perfect.
In psychological circles, it's called post-traumatic growth...The more we are shaken, the more our former selves and assumptions are blown apart and the fresher the growth.
Harvard researchers found this kind of seismic implosion often leads to creativity. The space created by stepping into the 'is-ness' of life invites the innovative thought and exploration. The examples of this kind of life disaster-first trigger for creative greatness are well known. The research goes as far as showing that people who felt more isolated after a traumatic event reported even greater creativity.
I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
It can be a scary chore to set out and 'trust life'. So I take a slightly different tack.
I go straight to being the person who is open and cool with not knowing. I practiced this heavily while coping with the vagaries of my disease and my diagnosed infertility and singledom that lasted eight years. I kept saying to myself and others who asked what the future held, 'I don't know'. But I wouldn't say it despondently; I'd be deliberate a bout being cool with it. In doing so, I found a strength that is quite defining and satisfying.
Pema Chodron, who cites her two marriage breakdowns as the catalysts to her own spiritual and anxious journey, defines anxiety as resisting joining the unknown
...Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in a library in twenty-minute bursts broken up by flicking through random books that (gracefully?) provided perfect inspiration for his seminal book.
...Sit with uncertainty.
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