WTWN #91 - Still Anxious After All These Years

As I turn sixty-one, I’m almost as anxious as I was at sixteen. But maybe there’s still hope.

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. When we are anxious, we are on the verge of discovering something important.” – Kierkegaard

Today, I’m turning sixty-one.

As middle age fades in the rearview mirror, I still grapple with personal growth challenges.

I’ve changed as I’ve aged, but I notice in many ways that I’m the same person I was at sixteen.

I’m old enough to have been through several life phases, the two most significant being my American and European lives.

If that split hadn’t occurred so late (I moved to Finland when I was 47), it might look cleaner on paper. But I eased into it during ten years of travel before I moved. I chronicled those ten years of transition in my first memoir, American Misfit.

Shelves stuffed with self-help books on self-acceptance sag under their weight. One of the first such books I read was Thomas A. Harris's 1967 bestselling book, "I’m Okay, You’re Okay," in which Harris argues that balanced, mature relationships are possible only when you accept yourself and others.

This sounds like a cliché, but as Lloyd Cole said, “The reason it’s a cliché is because it’s true.”

The areas in which I have accepted myself are the areas in which I appear to be an emotionally healthy adult.

For example, I’ve accepted that I am a writer. It would be absurd for me to stop. As an experiment, I took a break from journaling for the past few weeks, and while it provided space and freedom, it felt awkward. I’ve been keeping a journal since I was 19—it’s part of what I need to make sense of the world, however I can.

I’ve accepted that I love discovering new music and am obsessed with collecting records (a pastime that merits an essay someday). Without delving into detail, I am aware that my record collecting is fueled by a desire for a physical connection to the music I love and the people who created it, particularly musicians who are no longer with us.

So, those are two areas of my life that are clear. But there are some things I’m still slow to accept.

One is my high level of anxiety. For more years than I can count, I masked anxiety with alcohol and cigarettes. After I quit those habits, I developed a habit of scrolling through news or social media to soothe myself.

Trying to stop anxiety-relieving behaviors is a game of whack-a-mole.

Until I get to the root of my anxiety, I’m only able to still it momentarily, through writing, meditation, or other distractions.

I can’t free myself from it meaningfully without understanding what it is and where it comes from. At best, I can describe it as a set of sometimes rational, sometimes irrational fears: fear of running out of time, fear of getting in trouble, fear of being abandoned, fear of losing things, fear of leaving things behind.

Finding a cure for anxiety is the final frontier of self-improvement for many people, perhaps because it’s an existential, not just a clinical issue.

But it’s still important to get to it, as anxiety is the source of relationship issues, creates unnecessary stress at work, robs us of sleep, and makes us waste time on unimportant things.

Anxiety drives the contradictory motivations of perfectionism and procrastination. It fuels compulsions, addiction, relationship and intimacy avoidance, people-pleasing, and overachievement. When we finally reckon with our anxiety, we may find it’s the quiet architect behind decades of our life stories.

As I begin to tackle my anxiety head-on, perhaps I can slowly start to change. Instead of using hard control to set up my days perfectly so nothing can go wrong, perhaps I can start to accept that surprises and things going wrong are a part of life.

Curing anxiety doesn’t usually mean it goes away. It’s more about integration than elimination.

When I sense anxiety coming on, rather than spiraling immediately into panic, perhaps I can stay calm. And someday, just maybe someday, I can even learn to smile at the chaos.