فصل یازدهم

chapter-11

make the beast beautiful

Following the California episode in my early twenties it took about a year to build myself back up again. I couldn’t study or hold down a full-time job. I worked on building mental muscle with Eugene, reading up on my illness (with real books, researched crudely, not via internet searches), and I waitressed. Waitressing is good for such occasions. It’s bustling and distracting. You’re in service, so a blissful eight hours can pass in which you don’t think about yourself. And you can flee if you need to. You dump the coffee politely, then dash to the next order before your awkwardness freaks anyone out.

During this time, a guy I served coffee to gave me a book about obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’d asked about the red-raw rash on his hands and he’d told me he had a disorder that saw him wash himself over and over. I’ve never been one to hide stuff when prompted, particularly when I’m confided in; I presume I let him know I got his drift and he brought the book in the next day.

The book was called Nine, Ten Do it Again. I remember stabbing at it with my finger, ‘Oh my God! Counting things is a thing! A thing that other people do!’ So is doing it over and over. I recall reading that many OCD sufferers work to a counting rhythm of three, four and five. Electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla was a three man – before entering a building he would have to walk around the block three times and he would wash his hands three times. I, too, washed mine in sets of three. One, two, three. One two three. One two three. And then repeat, twenty-one times. Or ninety-six times. Or more. Unless I’d entered a four phase. I wonder now if it has something to do with the natural tempo of music, thus the seemingly lulling effect of counting for folk like me.

The very positing of this idea in my own head has just sent me down a horrible online rabbit hole looking into the various significances – mathematical, religious and otherwise – of the number three. For over an hour. I also learned, uncomfortably, that Tesla, like me, didn’t ever settle and lived out his life in a Manhattan hotel room … on the 33rd floor.

Anyway.

The book exposed me to a few other factoids. Such as that OCD exists in the same numbers – about 1.2 per cent of any given population – around the world, even in the depths of the Kalahari. The book also postulated (and I’ve picked up on this notion a number of times since) that far from being ostracised in ancient cultures, obsessive-compulsives were elevated to important leadership positions in communities. Their hyper-attendance to safety and hygiene – and all OCD symptoms cluster (in various, not always logical, guises) around these two themes – was a boon in days gone by. Shaman were likely OCD, goes some evolutionary theory.

I liked this.

About twenty years ago there was a documentary made about the work of Dian Fossey who followed a tribe of chimps for several years. It gets cited in various guises around the interweb by people interested in the role of mental illness in society. The gist is that in all chimp troops, there always exists a small number that are anxious/depressed and that tend to retreat to the outskirts of the troop, often socially disengaged. Fossey decided to remove these agitated chimps to see what would happen. Six months later the entire community was dead. It was suggested that the anxious chimps were pivotal for survival. Outsiders, they were the ones who were sleeping in the trees on the edge, on the border, on the boundary of the community. Hyper-sensitive and vigilant, the smallest noise freaked them out and disturbed them so they were awake much of the night anyway. We label such symptoms anxiety, but back when we were in trees, they were the early warning system for the troop. They were the first to scream, ‘Look out! Look out!’ In A First-Rate Madness, Dr Nassir Ghaemi argues that the best crisis leaders in history have had anxiety. ‘When our world is in tumult, mentally ill leaders function best,’ he writes. It’s a bold claim, but he goes on: ‘In the storm of crisis, complete sanity can steer us astray, while some insanity brings us to port.

‘The best crisis leaders are either mentally ill or mentally abnormal [he points to Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Ghandi]; the worst crisis leaders are mentally healthy.’ He says eminently sane men like Neville Chamberlain and George W. Bush made poor leaders. A lifetime without the cyclical torment of mood disorders, Ghaemi explains, left them ill-equipped to endure dire straits.

In the wake of the 2008 economic crash, some commentators have even suggested that the main cause was politicians and financiers who were either stupid or insufficiently anxious or both.

I absolutely believe it helps to see anxiety as having a meta-purpose beyond the arbitrary torture of our little souls. Pain is lessened when there is a point to it. We know this. Women wouldn’t go through childbirth and men wouldn’t fight wars if this weren’t true. For the anxious, this is possibly amplified by the fact that we tend to be very A-type, purpose-­orientated kids who find the seemingly all-­consuming, cruelly ironic, palpable pointlessness of anxiety unbearable.

During this same period in my early twenties, I also read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s era-defining Prozac Nation. In it she wrote, of her depression in her case, ‘That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.’ 65.

As Nietzsche said, ‘He who has a why can endure any how.’

Our ‘why’ today might just be the very important task of crying out, ‘Look out, look out … we’re doing life wrong.’ We, the highly strung, are the advance party who flag to the troops that consumerism is hurting our hearts, that the toxins we’re being fed via Big Pharma and Big Food are making us fat and sick and that … hang on guys! There’s no triumphant finish line in this mad, frantic race. So perhaps we could, um, back off. It’s we, the highly strung, who become meditation instructors, activists and online ranters.

New York Times bestseller and former addict Glennon Doyle Melton describes in a post how she was able to step out of the world of addiction by stepping ‘into worlds of purpose’.

‘Yes, I’ve got these conditions — anxiety, depression, addiction — and they almost killed me. But they are also my superpowers. I’m the canary in the mine and you need my sensitivity because I can smell toxins in the air that you can’t smell, see trouble you don’t see and sense danger you don’t feel. My sensitivity could save us all. And so instead of letting me fall silent and die – why don’t we work together to clear some of this poison from the air?’ I have often said the same – that we’re proverbial canaries reporting back.

Glennon adds this: ‘Help us manage our fire, yes, but don’t try to extinguish us.’

5.psd

STUDY SOME FRETTERS

TO KNOW THYSELF

Can I ask you to do yourself a favour? Dig around. Google a bit. Find the point to your particular flavour of anxiety. Read up on Big Minds who contributed Big Things while anxious. There are many, and the correlation between creative contribution (artistic, political, entrepreneurial) and anxiety is well documented.

Poets, for instance, are up to thirty times more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than non-poets. A 2012 study published in Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience found that anxious folk tend to have higher IQs. Another study that year followed 1.2 million patients and their relatives and found that bipolar disorder is more common in individuals with artistic professions including dancers, photo­graphers and authors. Scientists were also found to have the same link.

Simply studying anxiously Big Minds and Big Creatives can help us find our ‘why’. Political philosopher John Stuart Mills, for instance, had a huge nervous breakdown that lasted eighteen months from the age of twenty. But he experienced a ‘small ray of light’ when he started boning up on some French historians and reading poetry by Wordsworth. It got him more attuned to his emotions and more in touch with his inner emotional life. And this is what lifted his anxiety.

Consider the below a starting point for some know thyself study:

Romanian philosopher and insomniac E.M. Cioran felt the greatness of humankind came down to those who didn’t sleep. I read on the School of Life blog that he reckoned it was in those weird hours, out of sync with the rest of the world, that a singular creativity flourished, going as far as declaring, ‘What rich or strange idea was ever the work of a sleeper?’ Emily Dickinson’s phobias left her housebound after the age of forty, which in turn left her quite a bit of undistracted time and space to write. Ditto Charles Darwin for several decades.

You should too!

I follow Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings blog. It alerted me to notorious fretter Anaïs Nin’s diary notes about the importance of allowing her intensity to overflow as it needs to. ‘Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.’ Daniel Smith in New York Times bestseller Monkey Mind also experienced a discernible lift when he realised his anxiety was a necessary and important part of the artistic Jewish experi­ence. ‘To be anxious wasn’t shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be … more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be the person who saw with sharper eyes and felt with more active skin.’ Frédéric Gros in The Philosophy of Walking flags this particularly grim insight from the mad hiker, Nietzsche: ‘To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities – I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-­contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not – that one endures.’ BONUS! A LITTLE LIST OF KNOW THYSELF BETTER READS, BY NO MEANS COMPLETE

The Road to Character — David Brooks

Your Voice in My Head — Emma Forrest

The Noonday Demon — Andrew Solomon

The Fry Chronicles — Stephen Fry

Monkey Mind — Daniel Smith

Reasons to Stay Alive — Matt Haig

My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind — Scott Stossel

The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath

Flick across the page for a bit more about Jamison’s story.

An Unquiet Mind — Kay Redfield Jamison

M Train — Patti Smith

Book of Longing — Leonard Cohen

66.

Bipolar disorder, too, has a meta-purpose, according to some evolutionary theorists. I’ve read many works by anthropologists who point out that manic depression is a genetic quirk that pops up in the same numbers across populations around the world – again about 1 per cent – and might exist for an important reason. Daniel Nettle, in Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature, says manic depression is essential to the human genome. Those who experience intense moods are predisposed to building possible worlds, as well as to take risks and test boundaries. He explains that in the past, manic depressives pushed humans forward with their deep insight and creative urges, they strengthened the gene pool by being the ones who bravely ventured out of insular communities into uncharted territory. When they returned, they brought new skills that enhanced progress and survival. Nettle points out that these bipolar behaviours are respected if not revered in some cultures. In Inuit and Siberian cultures, for example, those deemed mad in our culture are heralded as healers and spiritual leaders.

Of course you can’t get too haughty about such things. Declaring to those around me (who were quite convinced I was bipolar) that I didn’t have a problem, but was instead one of a chosen few saviours of the human race, would have entirely disproved my point.

67.

In my twenties, during my year of waitressing, I also read psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, which details her own struggle with bipolar disorder.

A passage stood out for me:

‘The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.’

The Chinese proverb puts things in the imperative. I prefer to phrase it as a gentle invitation: Let’s make our beast beautiful.

I believe with all my heart that just understanding the meta-purpose of the anxious struggle helps to make it beautiful. Purposeful, creative, bold, rich, deep things are always beautiful.

In An Unquiet Mind Jamison comes around to thinking that acceptance, rather than transformation, is her endpoint, putting her ahead of the second wave positive psychology curve by a good fifteen years. I share this quote below because it’s bold and true and has had a hugely significant impact on my own path: I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until … the watch is taken from the wrist.

It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships.

Jamison takes things beyond a resigned acceptance of her unquiet mind. By accepting the storms and complications of her ‘individual moments’ she’s able to find a personal purpose to her life. Her beast becomes beautiful.

At the time I read this, I was grappling with my own bipolar diagnosis. But this passage said to me, you know, it’s okay. The storms and bleakness and madness count for something. The restlessness will lead to something. These ‘individual moments’ or expressions count.

I’ve continued to explore this theme ever since and have found that my unique moments can either make me feel dreadfully alone and unhinged, or unique and a little bit special. It can be a choice to view your individual moments with bemused compassion and intrigue. To find them cute and beautiful. I try to do this. While trying to not lose connection with my humility.

SOME OF MY ‘INDIVIDUAL MOMENTS’ … YOU KNOW, AS THOUGHT STARTERS

Do not feel in any way feel that you have to find these cute. I struggle to a lot of the time. But see if they can spark a bemused reflection on your own restless or bleak quirks.

I shower or bathe before bed. Always. But you know that already.

I change dinner venues on friends several times. If I’m not sure, it can become an ordeal that goes on for days as I try to work out the venue that will best suit all involved. I also change table positions, generally at least once. Mostly to avoid draughts or perfumed neighbours.

I have to go to the toilet three (or four) times before getting into bed. While counting in sets of three (or four). I know I mentioned that I’d worked quite heavily on my OCD back in my early twenties with Eugene. But I still live with a few stubborn vestiges of it that relate back to my fear of not sleeping. I accept this imperfect result. I call it a bit of residual scar tissue.

I over-research. Everything. When I bought my most recent car, after being car-less for almost five years, I over-researched the most environmentally sound option on the planet. I couldn’t help it. I looked into manufacturing carbon costs versus on-road carbon costs, how different driving techniques affected carbon loading and every other conceivable environmental factor. My over-zealousness exposed a fault in the algorithms of Australia’s green car guide. Which I promptly pointed out to the government department responsible. Who, equally promptly, returned my call to agree, yes, I was right and that they were correcting it immediately.

I took three years to buy my first couch. But rest assured it is, of course, the most functional, most toxin-free, most environmentally sound option on the planet. You might be interested to know Steve Jobs took eight years. His wife, Laurene, explained that they discussed the best design and philosophical principles of couches for close to a decade. ‘We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, “What is the purpose of a sofa?”’ Yeah, me too.

I have to do dangerous, reckless things occasionally. I call it ‘putting a bomb under the situation’.

When someone loses something, I must find it for them. Every bin is fossicked, every beach scoured, until I do. Sometimes I’ll picture its location (late one night, in the shower, or while riding home from dinner) two weeks later. Bam!

I can’t settle for longer than about six months. My belongings have been in storage now for seven years. I could find this a problem. And regard my attachment to the notion as ‘ugly pride’. But it’s also who I am.

I still climb trees. At forty-three.

68.

I did a presentation at a writer’s festival not so long ago. It was a talk about turning a passion into a business. In the Q and A at the end, the first question from the audience came from a woman in her mid-forties who leaned forward over her notebook on her lap. She was half-standing in her eagerness to have her question heard. ‘On your personal blog you’ve written quite a bit about how you have anxiety. But I don’t understand how you manage to do so much, to run a business and do public talks – and stand up there like you are now – when you have anxiety.’ She paused and sat back reluctantly. ‘How do you do it?’ I knew my answer.

I told her I look back now and can see that every major step forward in my career has been driven by my anxiety.

It leads me. It’s my internal traffic light system that tells me ‘go’ and ‘stop’. When I feel the anxious choke at my throat, that urghhhh, I know something is not for me. Stop! it screams at me. In this way my relentless anxiety – and my awareness of it – has helped me make big important decisions along the way.

I think anxiety pushes us. It exists to do so – it helps us friggin’ fire up. Even when it makes us stall with terror, it eventually makes conditions so unbearable that we ricochet off to a new important direction. Eventually.

This is what happened with my gig as co-host of the inaugu­ral MasterChef Australia series in 2009. In this case, my anxiety didn’t so much scream in my ear as explode. Throughout the eight months of filming my throat was tight with anxious choke. I was compromised by the role, shackled by the confines apportioned to women in Australian TV. I burned with frustration and boredom. It built up and built up and I’d stopped sleeping. The bags under my eyes, and weight gain from the sugary carbs I took to eating on set, saw me disintegrate in front of the record number of viewers who followed the first season. One day – the day we filmed the grand finale, aptly enough – I erupted. I was in the shipping container dressing room I shared with my three male co-hosts, being forced, again aptly, into a Jessica Rabbit corseted dress that saw my sugary carb-boosted bust billow voluminously. Did you see the finale? No doubt you watched it on wide-screen. My bust arrived on set. I entered shortly after. Ring bells?

The producers came in to the dressing room to announce yet another compromising set of instructions that would see me reduced to a vacuous talking head. I mouthed off at the producers for pushing us – myself and others who felt equally sleep-deprived and confined – too far. ‘I’m like a broom in a ridiculous dress with a wig. You press play and I mouth off your inane lines.’ Then (I recall watching myself in slow motion) I punched the wall of the metal shipping container. I broke two knuckles. The big bosses were called in to have calm chats with me. I walked off set and went to see my meditation teacher, Tim, feeling deeply ashamed. I’d never behaved like this in my life. Tim laughed. ‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘You lanced the pimple, you were the volcano that released the pressure valve. Let’s see what comes of it.’ Sure enough, the next day, I felt resolved and clear. I quit, pulling out of future series. And moved to the shed in the forest and created my own business.

Anxiety is also the grist to my mill; the textured, all-weather athlete’s track that provides the perfect surface from which I can make my highest jumps, up and over the rail. My anxiety activates my muscles, my fire, my fight. It also sees me care about everything. If I didn’t care that the food industry was leading us all astray, if I didn’t care that food wastage was killing the planet (and hadn’t researched the bejesus out of such topics), I wouldn’t have had the motivation to work seven­teen hours a day to meet publishing and business deadlines.

If I didn’t wake at 4am most mornings while building my business and writing my first few books, I wouldn’t have got my product to the printers. Seriously. Those 4am awakenings, at times, have fine-tuned what I do. And if I didn’t fret until things were the best they could be, my books wouldn’t have sold. The public can ‘smell’ when care is present, and when it’s not. Social media is fabulous like that. There’s nowhere to hide inauthenticity and followers simply drop away when they sense that posts are being done mechanically or by third parties or without passion.

Also, if I didn’t know what it was like to go down deep and dark, as I have with anxiety, I wouldn’t know how to take crea­tive risks. The fact that I lost everything at several stages in my life to my anxiety and related illness means I have little attachment to material outcomes. I actually don’t care about money. I don’t get around to spending it. Quite frankly, having it makes me anxious. And so when I’ve come to big forks in the road in my career, I’ve been able to take the more unconventional, true path, unadulterated by bottom-line concerns. I’ve been able to rebuild and redefine my life several times because I’ve had nothing to lose.

And I should recognise that my manic outbursts, which I continue to have, have helped me write some of my most intimate, connected posts, often very late at night and in ecstatic tears. My mania, when tamed a little, has enabled me to connect, which has always been the basis of my business model. One of I Quit Sugar’s five values mantras is to ‘Give a Shit’.

I explain to the woman with the notebook at the writer’s festival, that, sure, I don’t know where to draw the line at times and when to rein things in. But that’s my challenge: to use the anxious fire to ignite things, but then be able to dampen it to keep things burning steadily.

‘You know that Lupe Fiasco song,’ I say, ‘where he kicks and pushes (and coooasts) and it’s super smooth and heart lifting? That’s what I do. I kick and push from the grist. Then I work on coasting. Which is much more fun than trying to fight anxiety.’ 69.

Although, we mustn’t overly romanticise things. The Fault in our Stars author John Green warned at a conference not so long ago against thinking we should all be inducing our anxiety (by coming off medication that otherwise tempers the condition) to access ‘genius’. He pointed to the TV series Homeland – the main character Carrie, played by Claire Danes, comes off her meds so that she can discover the identity of the terrorists and save America. Apparently, she needed her mania to do this.

At the conference Green told the audience about his own similar experience the year before. He hadn’t written a book in a long time and, blaming his medication, decided to go off it in the belief it would help him to write. The experiment didn’t work: he produced nothing that made any sense during that whole time. In the end, he said, it was better to deal with his chronic problem, to manage it rather than romanticise it, in order to produce his best work.

Glennon Doyle Melton has a slightly different take. She goes on and off antidepressants because she needs the desperation of depression to fuel her creativity. On medication she says she loses the feeling ‘if I don’t write I will die. This is how I feel when I’m depressed. Since I lose my joy and meaning, I come to the blank page to create meaning and joy, to get it back. Because I become desperate to make sense of things. And that desperation, I’m afraid, is what makes my writing good.’ It’s a fine line – at what point does respect for your heightened sensitivity and creativity become problematic – even dangerous? I can’t really answer it. I, too, flirt with the agitated, creative edge. I’ve toppled, too. But I see it as a responsibility to keep alive to that sensitive tipping point at which I need to pull in (and take medication or get help or rest). It’s a bit like a parent who must know when to rein in their hyper-excited toddler who’s showing off to the guests almost embarrassingly (but creatively and expressively) before it ends in tears.

70.

Just a small thought. I’ve learned that at a biological level, anxiety is a lot like excitement. Both anxiety and excitement make my heart quicken and my stomach flutter, and send a wave of ‘Ooh ooh ooh, This is Serious Mum’ over me.

So you know what I do now? I often choose to interpret anxiety as excitement whenever I can. Standing on the preci­pice, about to jump into something new, I often feel anxious. But if I pause and reflect, I realise it could equally be excitement that I’m feeling. When you see it as excitement it’s BLOODY FUN.

Since handing in the first draft of this book, I’ve learned this thing that I do has a name – ‘anxiety reappraisal’.

In 2013 Harvard University researchers found that simply saying ‘I’m excited’ out loud could reappraise anxiety as excitement, which in turn improved performance during anxiety-inducing activities. Another study published last year asked people to list goals they had that were in conflict with one another, such as training for a marathon and finishing an ambitious project. Some participants were asked to recite the phrase ‘I am excited’ out loud three times, while others just recited their names. Those who reappraised their anxiety as excitement felt they had more time on their hands to complete their goals.

Tiger Woods once declared, ‘The day I’m not nervous is the day I quit. To me, nerves are great. That means you care.’ Right on! Bill Russell, one of the best basketball players in history, anxious-vomited before 1128 of his games. To his teammates it was a good sign – he was on fire. But then there are just as many sporting heroes – and war heroes and politi­cal leaders and artists – who can cite moments where their anxiety choked them. Greg Norman blew a massive lead with a big fat choke once and wound up crying in the arms of his competitor. Thomas Jefferson and Gandhi both suffered social phobia. Barbra Streisand choked for twenty-seven years, unable to perform live. Carly Simon had to stick pins into her skin before going on stage to distract her from her anxiety.

Adele has extreme stage fright and suffers panic attacks. She has developed an alter ego to cope with her anxiety and also limits her touring. She says she’s scared of audiences and once used a fire exit to escape from fans. At another concert she projectile vomited on an unfortunate audience member.

Actress Emma Stone says acting, funnily enough, is the thing that helps her. ‘There’s something about the immediacy of acting,’ she said. ‘You can’t afford to think about a million other things. You have to think about the task at hand. Acting forces me to sort of be like a Zen master: What is happening right in this moment?’ But again, it’s a fine line between flying and choking from anxiety, between being a hero and a coward. I don’t know how I’ve wound up using so many sporting analogies, but I have another one. Mike Tyson’s trainer once told journalists, ‘The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear … while the coward runs. It’s the same thing, fear, but it’s what you do with it that matters.’ Yes, it’s what you do with it. And perhaps whether you treat it as beautiful.

When I’m doing something definitely scary, I’ll allow my anxiety to have the stage. It’s always got me through maths exams and driving tests and TV gigs. I let it express itself. Which might sound irresponsible. But I’ve found that it’s only when you put the brakes on its forceful charge through your system that it leads to things like freak-outs or brain freezes.

Let anxiety be and it will be less so. And quite possibly beautiful and exciting, too.

71.

Of course, when we’re anxious we’re mostly told to calm down, to turn the dial down, to … just relax!!!! Are you like me and find this possibly the least helpful advice ever? (As I Instagram memed once, ‘Never in the history of calming down has anyone calmed down from someone telling them to calm down.’) Turns out, in the Harvard University study, researchers concluded that for most people it takes less effort for the brain to jump from anxious feelings to excited ones, than it does to get from anxious to calm. In other words, it’s easier to convince yourself to be excited than to bloody well just relax when you’re anxious. Surprisingly, though, the excitement reappraisal didn’t actually make the subjects less anxious, nor did it lower their heart rate. That’s because the underlying anxiety was the same – it was just reframed as excitement.

72.

To round things off, let’s indulge in a list of reasons why anxious people are not that bad to have around. Our anxiety does have some beautiful kickbacks for those in our orbit. Again, you might like to leave this lying around open to this page. Or Instagram it. With a justsayin tag. Subtly and humbly, of course.

Planning a picnic? Get an anxious mate on board – they’ll be able to provide you with a full itinerary of weather contingency plans. And better salad delegation techniques. Jerome Kagan, who spent sixty years studying anxiety, says fretters are ‘likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends’. This is nice to know, no?

Planning a dinner party/holiday/walk in the park/any kind of event in the next 365 days? Their phone will be charged, they’ll have remembered Oliver is gluten-free, they’ll have factored in dinner with your mum next month and your couples counselling appointment at 5pm.

They can spot a dickhead. Their heightened threat radar means they’re selective about who they befriend. If you’re one of their mates, you can rest easy knowing you’re not a dickhead.

If you’re about to be mugged in an alleyway, stick with the anxious person; they’ll have all possible escape routes mapped out upon entry.

They’ll hear, and attend to, the dripping tap well before you finally hear it and have to get up out of bed to turn it off.

They will book you both the quietest room in the hotel. They just will.

They’re tough. As a functioning anxious person, they work hard as a matter of course. When the going gets tough, they naturally rise to the occasion. As I’ve said before, real-life threats are a cinch. Equally, they have tomes of great life advice when you’re going through a rough patch. Veritable oracles.

They give a shit. About everything.