The Anxiety That Never Ends

The deceptive promise behind many of our anxieties is that they will come to an end if … if we finally finish our studies, secure a job, find someone to marry, build a home. But the reality – sober, private, dark – is a great deal more disturbing, indeed almost impossible to accept: that whatever we try, anxiety may simply be a constant within us, not something that will ever quite leave us alone. It is the most protean and inventive of afflictions, always finding new ways to return, to disturb us and insert itself between us and what we are trying to appreciate – a beautiful day, an orange tree, our children. What we worry about will change; that we will worry never seems to.

Why? What has cursed us – we the worried cohort – singled out for lifelong punishment, never free to forget our dangers and regrets and shame for longer than a few hours?

Maybe we should cease – on top of everything else – to worry that we are worried. We should accept our affliction with grace, contained rage and resigned good humour.

We are, after all, worried for such sound reasons: because we were born into a world without guarantees of anything. Because we have been abandoned before, and may be so again. Because we were not held or soothed properly at the start, and fear is now encoded in our bodies. Because mother was frightening and father was shouting. Because others were cruel far before we were ready to locate the problem in them, rather than in ourselves.

We worry because – even as our capacity to master events has grown – so too have the challenges. Because we got together with the wrong person, or the right one left us. Because our financial affairs became complicated. Because politics went mad. Because our bodies became vulnerable. Because we acquired enemies. Because time is running out very fast. Because we don’t have enough of the right kinds of friends; those who allow us to be weak, those who suffer as we do, those who can be gentle because they know our fragility from the inside. We worry because we still don’t have a true home, where the pretence can cease and we can cry as we need to.

There are so many suggested cures for our sense of threat: to breathe more deeply, to exercise, to take fresh air, to eat more fruit, to sit in silence. These are deeply well-meaning. We love the gurus who proffer them. But just as important might be the right to name the problem and complain about it loudly, without pressure to be wise or remotely grown-up. To be allowed to weep copiously, and (quietly) scream. To have the privilege of finding other people who suffer as we do, and who will not force sentimentality or denial on us.

Perhaps the greatest peace available to us comes from knowing that our torment is never quite going to end. We may find pleasure in beautiful pictures of calm, in promises of serenity; but they will forever elude us inside. To accept this is the ultimate stiff consolation. We’re strange, but we don’t need to feel uniquely cursed. Many of us are exactly the same, even if we can rarely say so in public, even if there is little outward evidence. For our part, we understand. We know. We feel exactly the same way. We could be the best of friends, companions through the lands of worry, waiting to embrace one another in our sorrows, and laugh with tenderness and despair at the unceasing, cruel pain.