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chapter-15

back the fuck off

Can I just ask, would you describe yourself as a control freak? Would you describe your grip on life as white-knuckled? Do you tend to be even a little bit of a perfectionist?

I’ll go first. It’s a yes, yes and yes from me.

We, the anxious, fret. We meddle. We care (yes, we care!). We try to solve, to fix and to find the endpoint. This is what we do. Agree?

I said earlier that making decisions is a key anxiety trigger. If we drill down a bit we can see that this happens because we work to the belief there’s a perfect decision out there to be made. But such a thing doesn’t exist. And clutching at something that doesn’t exist is enough to send anyone into a drowning panic. We can never find the best option. Anxiety is what occurs when we realise this, when we realise that we are not the captains of our own ships. What do we do next? We grip more, grasp outwards more, get busier and more controlling.

— cruel irony 15

I convince myself that controlling my life and aiming for perfection will cocoon me from anxiety. But it only causes more of the dreaded thing.

The Germans, once again, have a word for such heavenly clusterfuckiness (they really do understand the complex paradoxes of the anxious condition, don’t they?).

Verschlimmbessern: (verb) To make something worse in the very act of trying to improve it.

97.

We all just need to back the fuck off.

98.

Back in Year 8 English Mrs Cochrane set our class a metaphor assignment. We’d covered analogies the week before.

As ever, I took the task incredibly seriously. ‘There’s a river that flows,’ I wrote somewhat loftily. This is life’s inevitable logic, the logic that ensures eyebrow hairs sprout exactly where we need them to protect our eyes from dust, and ensures that springtime rolls around just as winter becomes unbearable, and that sees specks of moisture coalesce to form rainbows. I used these very examples in my assignment, but I’m saving you the tortured prose by paraphrasing things heavily.

Some of us try to dam the river with piles of logs and other obstacles because we think the river should flow differently, by micro-managing our partners or blocking our pain or by forcing a dinner that no one wants (they repeatedly cancel but we ignore the signs and keep rescheduling). When we do this, the pressure builds. And builds.

The water (the flow of life) banks up behind the obstruction, determined to continue its flow because, you know what? It kind of knows where it’s going. It’s ingrained in the groove of the valley, the gaps in the boulders and it’s bigger than us. Way bigger and way more knowing.

Eventually the flow wins out and Boof! our micro-­managed pile of logs explodes from the force of the flow. Our stuff goes flying in all directions. It’s devastating.

And, then … the river goes back to flowing as it was always going to. Before we came along and got in the way.

I round off my metaphor assignment (cringefully) by advising the reader (poor Mrs Cochrane) to perhaps try using the logs to build a comfortable little raft instead and to sit atop it and let the river carry them languidly down the river.

I got a B for the project. Twenty-five years later Mrs Cochrane connects with me over Facebook and we meet for meatballs in New York’s Soho where she now works. I took my below-par grade up with her. I’d been really happy with my torturous metaphorical tale; I had wanted to take it up with her back then, but our school was not the kind that encouraged such proactive and empowered behaviour. Mrs Cochrane and I spent the rest of the night talking about the flow and the synchronicity of life, the very flow that brought us together that night. The very flow that my perfectionist thirteen-year-old self had wanted to interrupt by disputing her grade.

99.

More flow. The next day I was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others at McNally Jackson, my favourite bookshop in New York. Flowingly. On page 108 (a mathematically perfect number) I find this line: ‘I wanted all human life to be pure, transparent freedom; and I found myself existing in other people’s lives as a solid obstacle.’ 108 is an important number for me. I chat about why on page 297.

Yes! More than anything we want to exist in pure, flowy freedom. We don’t actually want to build dams.

We need to get out of the way.

We need to let go.

We need to take our ‘filthy mitts’ off life … for ourselves. And for others.

Besides, we don’t want to feel we have to do it all on our own. I want to know that life ‘has this one’. That I’m held and can chill out on top deck for a bit with a drink with an umbrella in it.

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FOLD FORWARD AND SURRENDER

You might like to try this thing I was taught in a yoga class about ten years ago to access this flow business. At the end of the yoga class we would sit cross-legged in meditation for a few minutes. After five minutes the teacher invited us, gently, to fold forward from our hips over our legs and ‘surrender to the day’, our arms outstretched in front. That’s it.

Please do try it.

For there’s something about collapsing into the earth like this that truly sees one ‘give in’. It’s not a novel idea. Supplication to the feet of the sublime has been doing the rounds for yonks.

You don’t have to do the yoga and meditation bit first, although both open the body and mind perfectly. A walk to a park and a little sit on grass in the sun for a bit would no doubt do the trick. You might be holding a stack of tension and worry. The walk and quiet sit will soften this a little. But when you fold forward, notice if there’s not a discernible release that kicks in.

Emotional tension is held in the hips and groin according to yogic tradition. This is stretched and massaged by the release. Feel into this. There’s a ‘giving in’ entailed in the gesture. Folded over, the blood running to my head and heart, I’m aware the day will run as it needs to and I just need to flow with it. I board the log raft.

The part I loved most was when the yoga teacher invited us all to rise to sitting and to ‘take it with you into your day’. Try this bit, too. Try holding the feeling as you walk back home, as you make your breakfast, as you kiss your kids goodbye, as you sit down to write your first email of the day. See how long you can hold the languidness.

100.

When I was nineteen I was mugged in Nice after hitchhiking to the French border from Florence. I was left with no backpack, no passport, no identification, no money, no credit card and with ‘only the clothes on my back’ – a pair of jeans, black boots and a navy Sportscraft turtleneck (which I still wear).

You know what? It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.

After spending a day on the beach in my underwear with some US soldiers who bought me lunch at McDonald’s, I jumped the overnight train to Paris. I chose First Class. (If I was going to get busted for jumping a train, it might as well be a decent ride.) Around midnight I was caught. I had no identity, of course, and insanely the guard believed my story and told me to get some sleep. He patted my shoulder.

In Paris the Australian Embassy would not issue me a new passport without $200. The bank wouldn’t issue me $200 without a passport. You see my bind? This was before email and internet and mobile phones. It took two weeks for the issue to be sorted as I jumped the Metro back and forth between the bank and the Embassy.

For two weeks I was itinerant and renegade and it was one of the few times in my life I’ve not been anxious.

Which I know seems counterintuitive because I was neck-deep in everything that freaked me out – sleeping arrangements I couldn’t micro-manage, meals I couldn’t pre-plan, and uncertainty in every direction.

I snuck into youth hostels each night and took whatever bunk bed I could find and I stole food from supermarkets. Old men at fruit stalls gave me peaches and baguettes when I walked past, perhaps picking up on my vulnerability. Peaches and baguette, then, it was for dinner. I would sit in the Jardin du Luxembourg and eat it, as happy as a girl can be.

I roamed and killed time and I would enter shops and feel the lightness of knowing I didn’t have to make decisions as to whether to buy the cute T-shirt as a memento of my Parisian stay. And I couldn’t take photos.

I had no control. No agency. I was a passenger for two weeks. My anxiety had nothing to grip on to.

Plane turbulence can produce the same sense of lightness in me. I’m not in charge, there’s nothing I can do. So I sit back and enjoy witnessing the ride. Ditto my few stints in hospital for various surgeries. I’m aware I can’t do anything to help the situation and that my filthy mitts can’t grasp at anything and so my anxiety goes on a little holiday.

In a similar vein, studies have shown that Brits who had neurotic disorders prior to World War Two, experienced a decline in anxiety in the wake of bombing raids. A German study in the 1950s found the same among concentration camp prisoners with the same disorders – their symptoms went into remission during the war.

Like I’ve said before, emergencies put us into the present. And anxiety struggles to exist in the present. The hyper-­attention required in a real-life upset flips us out of our funk. We can’t be focused on our grandmother dying or a loved one’s miscarriage and be anxious. They’re two competing parts of the brain and the part that deals with real life wins out.

As I’ve flagged already, old anxiety happens to be a bit of a mono-tasker. You can’t be anxious and be in the present. And you can’t be anxious and attend to genuine fear or catastrophes. And you can’t be anxious and walk mindfully or breathe deeply.

Let’s pause on this for a sec. Let it sink in.

No need to spell it out further, right? Okay, then …

101.

Even being forced – as in, absolutely beyond our control – head-on into our neurotic fears can abate anxiety. Matt Haig tells how his agoraphobia abated when he was thrust into a trip to Paris (coincidentally enough). His long-­suffering girlfriend had bought him the trip for his birthday. Haig had previously been unable to go to the corner shop for milk without having a panic attack. But being forced beyond his fear threshold – and surviving – brought a certain relief. ‘The best way to beat a monster is to find a scarier one,’ he writes.

My friends have a young daughter riddled with anxiety and OCD. When she was eight or so, they told her she didn’t have to go to her friend’s party (which she was dreading) if she cleaned her teeth only once that night. The trade worked. The next day the poor little chicken excitedly told her mum, ‘Keep making me not do things, please’. Keep rendering me choiceless, was her desperate plea! Bind me! This story still sends a chill through me. A child of eight had worked out the strange machinations of her anxious mind in a way few doctors probably would.

My own experience matches up. Unfamiliar surroundings can buck me out of my anxious rut, again because the usual stuff I grip on to isn’t immediately apparent or avail­able. I can often sleep on a train or a plane, better than I can in a bed. You might think the vibrations and bright lights and snoring businessmen who’ve had too much complementary whiskey – some of my worst triggers – would send me over the edge. But it’s almost like it’s all so bad (a scarier monster), and so uncontrollable, I have to give in to the ‘is-ness’ of it all. I’m rendered choiceless. I think, in some ways, this is why I live so nomadically. It keeps me in a perpetual state of being confronted with scarier, uncontrollable monsters. The adjusting and fending stops me from noticing the dripping tap three apartment blocks away. Knowing I’m leaving in two months’ time means the waft of aftershave from the flat adjacent to mine at 7am every morning won’t tip me over. I wonder if this is why so many anxious types in history lived itinerantly?

I read in a New Yorker article about some recent science that postulates that psychedelics may be good for sufferers of OCD. The drugs were shown to shut down the default mode of the brain and disrupt the repetitive and control-focused patterns of thought and behaviour. ‘It may be that some brains could benefit from a little less order.’ Oh, my goodness, yes.

My editor Miriam had this to say about the theory: ‘This article just blew the top of my head off and I had to have a lie down …’ 102.

Let me touch on the myth of life balance for a moment. Some time in the last few decades we got it into our rigid heads that what we’re really missing is a magical balance between time spent on obligations and downtime. Apparently, our lives are completely out of whack – we’re pushed and pulled, and we just can’t get the damn ratio right. If we could perfect this magic ratio then we could address our anxiety. Familiar?

I looked into life balance for quite some time. It became yet another obsession of mine. Was there a magic ratio? What did the research show? Oddly, not what I thought.

Basically, the science shows that unhappiness among women correlates with having more options. Which probably shouldn’t come as a massive surprise to you this far in. ‘Having it all’ – career, kids, access to the rowing machine at the gym – has come with the pressure of feeling that we have to ‘do it all’. Women have got it into their heads that they should be able to do it all. And in perfect balance. And this has resulted in more stress and less happiness. (I speculate that men are feeling the same but it’s just not reflected in the research yet.) In response to these findings, UK pop-trend researcher Marcus Buckingham, who I did a bit of work with during my time at Cosmo, took a different tack and investigated, inversely, what the happiest women were doing differently. And his conclusion was this: they strove for imbalance. Messy, all-over-the-shop imbalance. This was new. And I liked the sound of it.

These happy women, he said, realised that balance was impossible to achieve and trying to do so caused unnecessary anxiety. I mean, how do you get the perfect ratio? For every new commitment you take on, do you allocate the same amount of time for sitting in a bath or doing a Meaningful Craft Project with your son? If a work project or sick partner suddenly requires more of your time, do you hold up the hand and say, ‘Whoa, world! No can do! I’m behind on my yoga class quotient!’ Instead, Buckingham found these chilled, happy women ‘tilted’ towards activities and commitments that they liked and found meaningful. Amid the chaos. They didn’t wait for the chaos and the commitments to get under control.

I love this idea. Tilting. It’s when you have so much to do and you could list it all out and try to prioritise. Or you could just sit in the everythingness and lean towards stuff as it arises that feels right. Tilting doesn’t involve holding up the hand and plonking a lump of logs in the flow. Nope. When you tilt you grab a log that looks about right and jump on.

103.

Learning to back the fuck off is really hard if you’ve been anxious all your life. So you need to mess things up a bit.

In The Happiness Project Gretchen Rubin rattles off a number of rather rigid rules for having a better life, but places the qualifier: Every now and then do the opposite of everything she’s just said. Seinfeld’s George Costanza inspiringly suggested the same with his opposite theory. He reasoned that since everything he’d done in life had been so wrong, if he did the exact opposite of what he normally did, he’d get it right. Right? It works; he picks up a hot woman instantly with the line, ‘I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.’ Indian philosopher Guru Dev says the same, ‘Do the opposite of what you’d normally do.’ Why? It injects freshness.The jolt of going against the grain gets you to look at things differently.

Doing these things makes me edgy at the time. But I play with it, treating it as an experiment, because I know that doing so quashes Perfect Moment Syndrome, a term I think one of my staff made up when I worked in women’s magazines, mostly for the resulting acronym. PMS afflicts those of us with filthy mitts on things and who think life should operate a certain way and to certain ratios. That birthdays are always happy. That a week in Thailand is meant to be relaxing. That a long-awaited date with your partner at a special restaurant will bring you closer together. When you shake things up there is no such expectation. It’s so wrong it’s right.

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DO IT AT THE WRONG TIME

When I’m gripping too tight, I’ll …

Eat dinner foods for breakfast. This morning I ate mashed pumpkin with garlic. Sometimes I eat grilled sardines on lentils. Or lamb chops.

Go to a 10am movie session on a sunny day.

Grocery shop at midnight. It feels slightly wrong and lonely, but, equally, much more fun than going on Saturday morning.

Write beyond my 9pm screen curfew on a balmy night sitting outside with a glass of wine, because I’m in the moment. And then take the following morning off and go to yoga at ‘office o’clock’.

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SLEEP AT THE OTHER END OF THE BED

Doing a few things back-to-front helps, too. Like putting your head where your feet normally go when you climb into bed. This tiny change is like a holiday. Everything looks different in the morning. Fresh and lighter. I read recently that business and creativity coaches have caught on to this concept and are calling it ‘vu déjà’. Which is the inverse of seeing something in the same way. It’s seeing what you always see, but in a different way. Or in Zen parlance it’s to have ‘fresh eyes’.