“The compulsion to fix things in every moment fatigues the heart”

The day the Bay Area was told to shelter-in-place, my partner called and told me that the clouds outside looked beautiful. I couldn’t even begin to notice them. With thousands of thoughts whirling in my head, it was a day when groundedness felt impossible. The anxious adrenaline pumping through my veins made my body almost feel as if it was leaving the ground entirely. 

That feeling felt so familiar. Though the events of this last week have been absolutely unprecedented, many of the feelings they have provoked in me are not. I recognized them instantly. This is extreme anxiety again. It almost felt like a visit from an old friend.  

Last week, before things escalated here, I went to a workshop by Liên Shutt  at at East Bay Meditation Center called “Taming Anxiety for People of Color” (As an organization that runs entirely on a system of “gift economics,” they are particularly struggling right now. Consider taking one of their free online classes this week, and sending a donation). 

For our first exercise, Shutt asked us to finish this sentence:

“My anxiety is…”

My response: 

“…Normal to me, now. It’s a constant state of being.” 

If I’m honest, sometimes I feel more at home in my anxiety than in any other state. Anxiety feels like energy. It makes me work hard. It keeps me moving. It helps me get things done. And that flighty adrenaline feeling? Sometimes it can feel so big and expansive that I can confuse it for excitement, when sometimes it’s a sign I’m overwhelmed. 

On Monday, after finishing a meal I cooked at home, I scrubbed each pot and pan, one-by-one in my sink, and wondered: what was at the core of my anxiety throughout my life? If I was in that workshop again, how I would finish that sentence now? My anxiety is…

The answer hit me so hard I stopped scrubbing, the dish soap dripping over my hands: 

“My anxiety is what I have always thought I needed to survive.”  

My anxiety is what made me figure out every elitist trick in my inequitable public high school to have the courses and test scores I needed to gain admittance into an Ivy League college. My anxiety helped me graduate from that Ivy League school, with a 3.7 GPA, when I started freshman year by nearly failing every paper. 

My anxiety is what made me skillfully navigate professional and social situations where I was constantly surrounded by people more privileged than me. My anxiety is how I learned to skillfully code-switch, and name-drop, and strategically frame conversations in ways that make those in power feel comfortable.

My anxiety is what has kept me financially afloat while freelance writing — constantly underspending to build savings. And on Saturday, my anxiety is what made me finally take this virus seriously.

It’s hard to let go of something you’re still not entirely convinced you can survive without. For folks less privileged than I am, this can play out even more intensely: anxiety not only helps them socially and culturally survive, but literally physically survive, helping them obtain the basic things their body needs. In a recent lecture at Spirit Rock (they have all their Monday talks free and online from now on), Matt Brensilver called this the “redemptive hope in anxiety.” In all these ways throughout my life, my anxiety has felt important and useful. I thought it could save me from everything scary in my life, by helping me anticipate everything that could shatter and fail right in front of me. I bet on that. As Brensilver put it: “We endow anxiety with a lot of trust.”

I have trusted almost nothing in my life more than my anxiety. Whenever that feeling enveloped me, I believed it, believed it was more real than anything else. I have spent so much time trusting my anxious body that I have no idea how to inhabit a calm one. I have even doubted “calm” has ever existed as a true part of me that’s possible. In many ways, I feel more comfortable with my anxiety than I do with actually trying to heal it.

But during his talk, Brensilver reminded us: “The compulsion to fix things in every moment fatigues the heart.” This week, that fatigue has felt clear. It felt like thirty-two years of fatigue, and a fatigue I can no longer keep carrying. But to let it go, I know I have to first believe it is safe to live without it. I have to both hold compassion for my years of needing it, while also believing that from now on, I can trust in myself instead. I have to stop falling for anxiety’s redemptive hope. Instead, I have to find that hope in the parts of me untouched by fear — the parts that have always been calm and free. Those parts emerge from me sometimes — during a yoga stretch on my sunlit porch, or a hike among trees drenched in golden hour light, or in the moments I dance alone, or in a laughter shared with loved ones when everything is difficult and I still refuse to stop cracking jokes. And yet I so rarely believe in those parts of me, so rarely endow them with my own trust.  

Two years ago, when I participated in a Temazcal ceremony for the first time, I remember a moment when a woman told our guide her intentions for the ceremony: “Curarme de mi tristezas, mi depresiones, mi anxiedad…” Cure me of my sadness, my depression, my anxiety.  

The guide of the ceremony quickly responded: “No sun tuyas, hermana.” 

The woman had used possessive pronouns: “Mis tristezas.” “Mi depressiones”. “Mi anxiedad.” My sadness. My depression. My anxiety. But the guide refuted those pronouns by arguing something different: they are not yours. 

That small grammatical distinction felt important. All this time, I have believed my anxiety was deeply mine, a more authentic part of my identity than anything else, rooted in who I inherently was. Here, the guide presented a different idea: these episodes of anxiety, these stages of depression — they are not mine. They do not belong to me. They are something that visits for a while, that perhaps I can even welcome for a while, but they do not live here. They have nothing to do with my authenticity. They have no place inside the real me. 

So that evening by the sink, I tried to give myself a moment of self-compassion to my anxiety, the anxiety I’ve known since I was a child, the girl whose anxiety ensured I would never let my immigrant family down, the anxious girl who was going to take her American privilege and fix everything. I tried to let myself feel the weight of that. I tried to feel proud of her.

And then, I tried to consider what my life could look like if I took all the trust I have put in my anxiety, and placed it somewhere else. My anxiety has achieved so much; I am trying to consider the possibility that I could achieve from now on by using something different, something I may already have. I remembered the question Shutt had asked us in her workshop: “When you’re anxious, you are searching elsewhere for solutions. But are you sure you’re not searching for things that are already present?” 

That’s when I noticed the clouds. Standing at my sink by the window, soap dripping from my hands, I realized my partner had been right. They were big, and bold, and a beautifully crisp white under the pre-sunset light.

In a week of chaos, they brought the calm I claimed I couldn’t find. It is already here. It was always present. I am trying to believe it is already who I am.