Build a bridge
If you’ve never experienced anxiety before, welcome to this handy info pack. Now, you may have imagined anxiety as ‘feeling a bit worried about something’. That’s certainly what I thought it was, but that was before I actually experienced what I would call ‘embarrassingly unhinged panic’ or ‘being possessed by a ravenous all-encompassing fear’. You know the fear is lying to you, but you’re possessed by it, see. This gluttonous, guzzling fear doesn’t listen to logic. It drives you, like a zombie, to grasp for whatever sense of control you might be able to muser. Let’s say you’re anxious about something to do with work. Your mind will, in attempting to solve the problem, run a whole lot of data about it and all the ways your situation could get… worse! Logically, obviously, these are doomsday scenarios but you’re losing control of your ability to process this. Your very survival mechanism - seeking control by thinking it all through - is feeding the seething mass. I know! So fun! You’re welcome! Aren’t you glad you asked. You didn’t ask? Anxiety doesn’t care.
Public Service Announcement: sometimes it’s the things we don’t know that can keep us safe or reassured or even just distracted. Sometimes we need to chuck the narrative.
When you learn something, like if you do a course in something for instance, the more you learn… the more you realise you don’t know. The more you know about, say, cycling, the more you realise you don’t know as much as people who buy cycling magazines. Then you become one of those people and you realise you don’t know as much as the people who write those cycling magazines. How is this helpful for the hungry monster of anxiety? Glad you asked. You did’t ask? Anxiety doesn’t care.
I don’t know about how bridges work. I barely know enough to describe the basics to a small child. Something about foundations? Geometric shapes? Triangles maybe? But how good is it that there is a whole thing I don’t know about that someone else knows about for me! They don’t know it’s for me in particular, but maybe they stay up at night worrying about triangles or quadratic something or other and maybe they get anxious too but at least they exist so I don’t have to care!
I love thinking about the things I don’t know. I find it so comforting that (a) there is always something more to find out, and (b) that somewhere, unseen by the rest of us, there are good, smart people, doing good, smart work that is going to pay off. It’s going to cure cancer or prevent all-out war. It’s going to lead to someone discovering a new way of grafting skin on or a new type of keyhole surgery. It’s going to make people laugh or make people cry or teach a new generation of children empathy. Go those invisible people! Keep going! I have a friend somewhere on the planet, not exactly sure where she is at the moment, who works in something called food security. Before she described her work to me, I had no idea what food security even was, but then I found out just enough to be deeply invested in food security news forevermore. Food security is about big things like governments and companies and nefarious legal loopholes and people not getting what they’re well and truly entitled to. It’s also about small things like a family being able to sit down together and eat and then sleep and have enough energy the next day not to get sick and die. Yes I’m quite aware that started as a small thing and ended as a large thing, thanks for asking. Didn’t ask? You know the deal.
Am I really saying that thinking about skin grafting and bridge-construction and food security will make your anxiety go away? I am not. But isn’t there something nice about being reminded that ruminating on the question of whether or not your boss doesn’t like you is not a problem plaguing the head of the UN? It’s not the reason a bridge is going to fall into the sea or a family won’t eat. Speak to experts about the anxiety thing, that’s what I did, but don’t forget: an internal narrative is only your brain telling you stories, and the world is full of stories. Try thinking about some of them too.