فصل بیستم

chapter-20

the last bit

I’ve always loved the parable of the little speck of light that lives in the middle of the sun. I’ve long forgotten where it comes from, or who first shared it with me. The Little Speck calls out to God that she’s ready to find out who she is. So God takes the Little Speck and deposits her far out into the darkness of the universe. There the Little Speck is surrounded by pitch black, which freaks her out. Against the darkness, not surrounded by the other familiar specks of light in the sun, she sees herself alone. She cries out to God, ‘Why have you forsaken me? I wanted to see who I am! This is not what I asked for.’ God says, ‘To see that you are light you must first go out into the dark.’

To see yourself – to see that you are part of a big, magnifi­cent whole – you have to go to the depths. I believe this now more than ever.

133.

We get anxious if we feel we’re not connected with our true selves and what matters. Something is not right, something is missing, we don’t understand what life is all about, and this gnaws at us. It doesn’t have to get particularly woo-woo. It plays out as a general social uneasiness (which we think we’ll just get the knack of eventually), as a sense that we haven’t got to where we’re meant to be (in our career, in our love life), as a persistent cynicism that it’s all a facade (the white picket fence imperative, the smug dinner party talk, the sea of selfie sticks), as inflammation in our bodies, as a desperate need for more food, more wine, more friends, more likes, more throw cushions. As dysfunction.

We’re unsettled, we grasp and we grasp. It’s like we’re bobbing for apples in a big barrel of water. But we come up with nothing.

But – oh glory be – by being in anxiety, by going down to the dark depths, we finally find the connection. Because anxiety, eventually and inevitably, makes us sit in our shit. It takes us there, to the darkness. It forces us to do the journey. And only then can we see what we were looking for. We can see the truth. We see it all as it is.

Anxiety makes us come in closer and eventually we arrive at something particularly and unspectacularly un-woo-woo.Ourselves. Phew, hey. Phew. The exhausting outward chase can stop. It’s all here. Right here. No need to run, anymore. We let go; we join the flow of life. It makes sense; we belong. Because that’s all there is. That’s what anxiety does for us. It guides us home.

And when we veer or we deviate from the truth, anxiety steps in and forcibly tells us ‘Wrong Way Go Back’.

Can we find untold wisdom and maturity and meaning without going through the ringer of anxiety?

I guess so. But would we go there unprodded, knowing the grit it takes? I doubt it. As W.B. Yeats wrote, ‘It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.’ I’ve been following the ironies and confusing paradoxes that anxiety presents. They’ve always seemed twistedly cruel and unfair. And my head has spun to understand, why me?

Why has life forsaken me?

I dunno, I guess it’s because I did cry out (to the Gods?) some time back to know. I wanted to know what they hell this is all about.

Be careful what you ask for, could be the lesson here. But it’s not.

The lesson is that my anxiety is what delivered me the answer. Which is the ultimate irony.

Eighty-odd years ago, Freud proposed that anxiety was ‘a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence’. The process of trying to solve the riddle, he reckoned, would help us unravel the juiciest mysteries of the mind: consciousness, creativity, pain, suffering and hope. To grapple with anxiety is to finally understand the human condition.

Have I solved the riddle?

Goodness, no. But I get that it’s all a riddle. It’s a wrangling with the truth that gets us closer, stronger, more warrior-like. We can view anxiety as something to accept and live with. Sure, this is important. But I reckon we can make the beast more beautiful than that. I prefer to say (to quote Shai from one of the forums again) ‘anxiety is my superpower’.

134.

Along this bumpy path, I’ve come to think that my problem was not so much that I had a problem. No, my problem was that there was so little guidance available to steer me as I wrangled with my anxieties, particularly in those formative years in my late teens and early twenties when many unhealthy mental patterns develop. There were no sturdy arms to hold my buzzing energy. No social framework that assured me there was a place to come back to when I’d descended. No wisdoms. No sit-coms that showed people sitting in their dark, fretful anxiety and getting really truthful with themselves. No one is to blame for this. It’s just that things have not been discussed in this manner for a very, very long time.

This, though, is the conversation we now need to have. This is the level of discerning, mindful, connected dialogue I think many of us are crying out for. We need to discuss the riddle.

Kierkegaard reckoned that anxiety is an ‘adventure that every human being must go through’. And Socrates said, ‘An unexamined life is not worth living.’ I disagree. Not everyone wants the adventure. Not everyone wants to lift the scab. But those of us who do need the new conversation.

135.

Writing this book I was kept in real-time anxiety. It took almost two years to write. Indecision and a liberal peppering of anxiety spirals delayed the process. Heady injections of mania ricocheted me back again to the page (although entire slabs of manic outbursting had to be removed on re-reading). During this time, I flitted between nine countries, moved house seven times, attempted suicide twice, restructured my business and fell in love with a man who pushed every single one of my fretty buttons. He held one of those shaving mirrors with an embedded fluoro light that they put in hotel bathrooms up to my filthy-mitted grip on life. The reflection was oversized and all the scars were visible.

I sat in this challenging reflection and loved him more for taking me to the grim depths. I really did. We spent weekends in the garage under the group house he shared with a revolving door of South American backpackers ‘hanging out’ (I’d never ‘hung out’ in my life; the notion filled me with a lawnmower-drone-on-a-Sunday-morning dread). Me reading the newspaper, researching, sometimes knitting; him painting and fiddling and watching surf reports on the iPad he’d set up for such purposes and listening to the footy on the radio, drinking cans of beer. When we felt like it, we got up and jumped in the ocean. And pondered where sand came from. Many around us couldn’t work out how we fitted together.

Other times every bit of my deep pain railed against him, tested him, and I twisted the dialogue into a double-helix spiral. I was railing against my own fear of letting go, of course, testing myself more than him. His reaction was to flee.

Then we got pregnant.

After eight years grappling with being a barren woman – watching friends produce beautiful children with increased frequency; telling men on the third date that I couldn’t have kids (then watching them fade away after a week or two); coming to terms with the loss of never having access to that maternal softness (with both a baby and my own mother) – this was the kind of rare shock that shut me up.

There were no words. I couldn’t tell close friends. I rationalised everything in my head, but inwardly broke down from the bigness of it all. To the Life Natural and others who did know, I appeared stoic, I guess. I’d planned my life around protecting myself from the barren woman status. I’d built a career around helping people so that I could have something to show for myself when I arrived at my deathbed with no grand­children. And now, and now … frankly, it was all out of control.

The Life Natural had intuited the pregnancy in his simple, connected way. ‘I think I just got you pregnant,’ he said the night we conceived, knowing the biological impossibility of it (it turns out it could only have been that night; I’d had an ultrasound the day before and got on a plane to London the next morning for two weeks). It all made sense to him. He loved the magic that had just happened.

I came to see the magic – the grace – of it, too. And a funny thing happened. About six weeks into the pregnancy I realised I wasn’t anxious. There was no background buzzing. It was wonderfully odd and I reflected that this was the only time I could recall not feeling anxious in more than twenty years. It was the oxytocin; it was the progesterone; it was the flooding of resources to new life in my belly; it was pregnancy brain (for some it makes them forgetful, for me it brought my thoughts into line with everyone else’s); it was love.

I knew when I’d miscarried, at ten weeks. The lovely, centred fullness had gone one morning and the brittle, noisy hollowness had returned.

I’m so sad to say the pain ate away at us. We trudged our way through a protracted anxiety-riddled breakup (or breakdown), prodded periodically by big doses of mania as I tried, relentlessly, to save us. The Life Natural had never encountered such complexity. This isn’t you, he’d say. The next moment he was telling me I was a bitch. My behaviour was certainly bitchy. He couldn’t reconcile I was neither. Or both. Or more than it. He couldn’t understand that I wasn’t trying to control him; I was trying to control my terror. That my attacks on him (which were wild and desperate) were pleas for help.

It took me months to realise that he was wholly bewildered. I tried to make it simple. I was a big wave, I told the Life Natural. The biggest he’ll ever encounter. He sought out big waves, he travelled the world to lunge himself at them (the non-­metaphorical kind), testing life much as I like to. To ride a big wave you first have to paddle out hard to get behind the point where they start breaking. You have to fire up and give it your all. If you do it half-heartedly, you’ll get smashed, and you’ll be pushed back into the churning whitewash over and over.

I told him that if we get out the back, we could ride the big energy together. In to the shore and back out again, leaving the whitewash behind.

‘All you have to do is join me. Hold me. I’ll take care of the rest.’

It was an invite, admittedly developed with manic enthusiasm and probably repeated too often to have any potency after a while. The Life Natural disappeared for a few weeks, then emerged to tell me my anxiety was too big for him. He couldn’t ride with me. He was deeply sorry.

This remains the hardest, most unresolved part of the anxious journey for me, and for many I’ve had the conversation with. The journey has to be done on your own. This is a terribly lonely thing to have to live with. And the loneliness hurts like hell, out there in the dark on your own.

So what was the reflection the Life Natural held up to me in that obnoxiously lit mirror? That if I want to let go, to truly let go and trust life, I first have to let go of the idea that someone else must hold me while I do it. No one else can tell me that life has this one. I have to do this for myself.

And back on the road I go.

136.

Some pretty recent anxiety research focuses on how resilience allows anxious folk to ‘thrive despite their anxiety’. One study conducted by Dennis Charney that got quite a lot of media attention (heightened in late 2016 when Charney was shot by one of his former researchers) identified ten factors that create resilience, among them having a moral compass or set of beliefs, faith and spirituality, an ability to leave your comfort zone and face your fear, having a sense of meaning in life and having a practice for overcoming challenges. I read about this research in the final week of writing this book and it made me feel less nervous about sending it to my publisher.

But I’d put it to Charney that it’s anxiety that leads us to these factors. Indeed, I’d say anxiety creates the resilience to thrive in this life. Anxiety is a beautiful thing.

137.

Did I come out healed? Will I ever?

Since childhood I have cried out to know where I fit, for life to make sense, to learn how to sit comfortably with myself on that bench in the sun. After thirty-odd years of doing the damn journey, have I arrived somewhere? Anywhere? Is that the question you now ask me?

David Brooks wrote that those who embark on the road to character as he puts it, or the path to meaning and sense as I’m putting it, don’t come out healed. They come out different.

I don’t sit here healed. I sit here simply knowing I’m on a better journey. And this is enough. This is everything.

When my anxiety gets bad, I stay with the pain. I don’t flee; I ride it out. I watch it. I cope. The rest of the time, I prepare, I buttress, I loosen the knots, I modulate, I build muscle with little right moves. And all the time I’m coming in closer, I’m understanding. I’m having the better journey.

I still meditate badly. But every single day that I sit down to do it, little pockets of tension bubble up that make my head jerk violently and I know I’m releasing my anxiety, little by little. And that folding forward thing I do each time at the end of meditation? Where I take my energy into the day? And I hold it and hold it? That does great things for me.

I’ve let go of some friends and peers; anxiety has alerted me to when this, sadly, has to happen. I’ve watched, astounded, as relative strangers come forward to help me exactly when I need it. I know how to spot good people, around the world. And I write letters to them and book in times on Skype to have discerning, mindful conversations with them.

I accept some people in my life feel better believing that I have a chemical imbalance in my brain. I take pills to sleep sometimes. I stumble, but like in yoga when you fall over in flying eagle pose, it’s the stumbling that sees my muscles unify and my mind become still and forgiving. Because it must. That’s where this better journey takes you, into a space where you keep being rendered choiceless and forced to soften.

I’m more mature. I like the stillness and certainty that comes with sheer years on the planet. I know that twenty minutes of swimming across an ocean bay will get me grounded. I know that all I have to do is tie on shoes, stuff a credit card and my phone down my bra, and take off to some dirt and rocks and hike when I have anxiety in my bones. These two things – ocean swimming and hiking – are what make me the happiest. And anxiety brought me to them.

I notice coincidences and don’t place too much importance on them. I just find them funny, like the fact that a moody early summer Sydney storm has erupted as I write these final lines. I can say ‘I love you’ and I know that I love loving.

I’m getting better at knowing what to care about. Again, anxiety is my compass. If I’m anxious, I know I’m going the wrong way.

I can deal with trolls and bullies. I see their barbs as a tennis ball flung my way. I can put energy into belting it back. Or I can let it sail past and land flaccidly somewhere behind me. I absolutely don’t care and this fascinates me.

I love Feist’s ‘I Feel it All’, because I do (feel it all).

I’m lonely and I’m awkward around a lot of people. But I enjoy talking to strangers who do unique, whimsical things. Like the old couple in the park who paint little canvases of whatever they see from whatever bench they sit on. This is the best thing for making you feel less alone.

I am anxious often. But it’s kept in check if I don’t get anxious about being anxious. And while ever I’m learning more, understanding more, this is entirely possible. Yep, the journey is what matters most. It’s everything.

This morning I went for a crazed run around the harbour and back up the steep stairs and now I’m eating 85% dark chocolate. I want to feed the anxiety. To speed things even further. As I do, I’m watching myself Doing Anxiety. It passes after a bit. I make some turmeric milk. I eat some leftover chicken and cheese and avocado and coriander for lunch.

I love that perfect quotes emerge like pink Volkswagen Bugs when you put your mind to a topic. Like this one that I found, again, while wandering around the bookshop in a writing break, stuck on this idea of whether I’m healed or will ever be: ‘Give up on yourself,’ wrote Japanese psychologist Shoma Morita. ‘Begin taking action now while being neurotic or imperfect.’ Yep. Just do it.

Now, mostly my joy comes from knowing I can do both. I can be neurotic and imperfect.

The camera is still rolling.

For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river/

Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.

— 18th-century Urdu poet Ghalib