The root of all anxiety
Why I never feel anxious
The calm before the storm. Where you find the world finally easing it’s weight on your shoulders but you cannot accept that it would last—or as I like to call it ‘anxiety’. Here’s how the phrase was popularized years ago, only it was about a literal calm before a literal storm. Sailors would kiss their loves by the dock and seagulls would circle them. As they set sail, their bodies and feet got used to being rocked back and forth. Waves would thrash then tides swayed boats to the music of the water. They were in constant motion, that was the way their journey started and how it was meant to be—never steady enough to pour a cup of coffee, but never strong enough to knock the cup out of your hand. But then the waves settled, the boat stopped, and the clouds were no longer moving. Maybe a crow would warn them, but beyond that—the sea would be as still as a painting. That was the calm. A literal one. Where feet stood on solid wood, waves became even, and light was on its last legs. Sailors would start to prepare because of what’s following this stillness, and when the first slap of thunder echoed, the storm was here.
I will say that I am no sailor, I cannot step into the ocean because fear would eat me up alive before any storm, but I know I won’t be preparing for the storm. If, by some miracle, I was blessed with a few minutes of complete peace and grounded floors, you best believe I’ll sit on the bow of the ship and just breathe. Here is my philosophy on it:
Will I ever be able to predict the storm’s severity? Will I know the exact moment it’ll end and how much damage our ship would have endured? Will I be able to stop the storm, delay it, or prevent it? Does the storm know whether or not I’m prepared?
The answer to all those questions is no.
Will the calm help me take in the beauty of the waves? Is the calm temporary? Is this calm unordinary and missable? Does the sight make me feel stable and help the sea-sickness settle?
The answer to all those is yes.
Doesn’t the decision become quite clear then? To honor the calm before the storm rather than prepare in advance for its leaving. In that instant, between the still sky and tides, I’d rather sit still. A simple change in your peripheral vision. Maybe that’s what you need (this isn’t about storm and sailors).
This is a diagram—not backed up by science, sociology or psychotherapy—of how life works with and against you. You see how it dips down, sometimes below the point of comfort, then springs up, beyond the point of usual-ness. The time-axis is not infinite, this is important for you to know. Life as we know it does not adhere to any statistical measure—if you use this graph I’ve made out of thin air to try and find any sequential pattern, you will fail. There is no pattern. There is also no bias. And there is no definite time only an ending time. And there is no definite solution. So, in summary, it’s completely unreliable. You have to swallow this graph whether or not you can logic-alize it, and I’m here to tell you it’s infinitely easier for you to accept this then it will be to try and make sense of it. there are things you can do to influence the curvature expectancy, you have power over one thing on this graph. The red line. That is your only power.
When the line dips, you have the power to gradually lift it back up, when the line rises, you have the power to stabilize it—not absolute power but some power. And in a graph you have menial information or control over, that matters. The rest of this essay will not be sweet, perhaps a little more straight to the throat, but if you finish reading this having only known how the phrase ‘the calm before the storm’ originated, I’ll be satisfied enough.
1. Turn it off, just let it buffer in awkward silence.
Over the past few months, I liked to track my screentime. A very good start to the journey of breaking up with my screen. But you don’t realize just how many screens your index finger presses, how many surfaces have a perfect outline of your fingerprint. I cannot go an entire day without at least one screen. A television, laptop, computer, phone, watch, iPad, digital wallets, digital mail, music through a screen, headphones Bluetooth-ed to something, the screen at the fro-yo down the street, and the one at the movie theater. If I see 2 hours of iPhone screentime, I feel accomplished. Barely anything compared to my friends who round to 9 or 10 hours of screentime. But let’s factor in the rest of the screens. I’m going to use very basic estimates to calculate the total. Won’t bother you with the specific maths and simple additions.
If I watch 6 episodes of The Office a day, order one fro-yo, listen to 3 albums, write a chapter on my laptop, respond to 4 emails, read 2 of my favorite Substack essays on my iPad, and watch a single YouTube video that amounts to…
7.08 hours a day of screentime outside my phone. 9.08 hours total. This doesn’t account for everything of course—like the screen playing a show in the background, the videos I watch snippets of before deciding on the final one to land on, the ad’s I sit through, or videos longer than 40 minutes. You can argue that this is productive screentime, but a screen nonetheless. Shutting your phone off, deleting social media, and wiping out your virtual existence is a great start but don’t be fooled into this false narrative that you’re doing better. You’re consuming your daily dose of blue light from other sources, so how low is your screentime? When you factor in the screens beyond the little one that fits in your pocket, are you more virtual than you are real?
Let’s do weekly estimates, maybe a bigger picture helps. If I spend 9 hours a day behind a screen, that makes for 63 hours a week, and 252 hours a month. Per week 2.6 out of 7 days is spent purely on a screen. 10.5 on a screen per month. I cannot imagine what two whole days of pure focus on my book, friends, work, reading, running, sleeping, walking, or just sitting would do to my body. I cannot imagine reading for longer than a few hours, I cannot sit still for a whole hour let alone 9 or 252. I’m only alive for 19 and a half days out of the month, the rest, I may as well be sedated in a coma. This relationship is sucking the life out of me, I need to break up with my screens.
2. It takes a village to feel like someone
I would sometimes feel the inexplicable pain of rolling over in my bed. The pain of my young joints would tell me to stay in. I would sink deeper into my mattress then extend my leg to open the curtains. I would watch the trees and people outside from my bed, sore and unmoving. Then I would finally gather enough courage to touch the floor. Some courage to put my hair up. A little more courage as I lather my face with creams and serums. When the courage would start to dispense, I would move faster to not let my body succumb back into that comfortable bed. That sexy, big, white sheet with lavender scented pillows. I would put on my ballet flats, grab a book, and make way down the street to the coffee shop less than 100 steps away from my apartment—I counted. As the crystals chime while I swing the door, a warm ‘you’re back!’ would lotion the soreness out of my body. Then small talk followed by laughter and a ‘I got you a free slice, Mary’ with the baristas would feel like the day amounted to something.
Because I’m somewhere with some people who know my name, who know my coffee order, and who talk to me when they see me because we’re familiar.
The way you sculpt a ‘third place’ isn’t by showing up every day. It’s by marking your presence. By saying please and thank you, by being bearable and human enough with whoever already occupies the space there. My simple advice: be nice. Open the door for them, clear your table, take a second to ask how someone is doing, step out of yourself for a second, try to be a real person and not just someone who orders a latte. We aren’t made to be independent our entire lives, certainly not made to be only connected to our virtual relationships. You need people, like it or not, you need to be surrounded by people who know you. You need people that make you feel good, that mirror you, that support your views, that build your identity or help you realize what isn’t aligning with you.
We need to be familiar with something, someone, we need to hear someone else say our names. You cannot be closed in, locked within yourself because it’s safe, but you also don’t need to be wide open for anyone to take a swing at you. You need to find the comfortable middle, but that starts with you facing a simple fact: no matter how strong you are alone, you will always need people. You need to belong somewhere. Find a community, spot, project, or shared interest that could fast-track that connection, but be glad if it never lifted off the way you’d hoped. There’s another day to try it all over again. Stop pretending you’re a lone wolf, a ‘I don’t chase I attract’ freak, an I don’t need nobody self-hating narcissist. You do. You need humans in your life. You need people, you need to be strong enough to go out of your way for somebody else. That’s how you feel full.
‘No one cares about anyone else’, ‘everyone is selfish’, ‘people are just out for themselves, no one cares whether I live or die’. This isn’t just a pessimist point of view, but a selfish one too. I think you may be thinking about yourself a little too much to think everyone wants the worst for you. I can assure you that people don’t think about you as much as you might think. You say phrases like that, but you fail to direct those questions towards yourself. Do you care about anyone else? Are you selfless? Are you out for others and do you go out of your way for them? If you’ll start predicting how someone feels or thinks about you, assume the best. It might not be true, and it might not amount to something, but you’ll be less angry at the world and much calmer.
3. The train terminates here, thank you for choosing our services!
When there was nothing in my horizon, and the entire world pressed down on me, I thought of him. I wanted to be with him, he didn’t love me very much and he hated it when I cried, but he was there. He stayed. And I thought of his arms when I cried alone in my bedroom. The thought of him made my sobering harder, my cigarette quitting near impossible. So, I would buy a fresh pack after three years of being smoke-free and walk to his apartment, already crying because I miss him. Walking back to the man who eases me but jump-starts my self-destruction. There would be freshly punched holes on his walls, a stranded bra he didn’t care to hide before I came, and a dirty dish towel he’ll toss at me when the sex-having is done. Then I’ll crumble into a deeper pit of self-disgust, but I won’t leave right away. He’ll hug me, I’ll stay.
False!
I would rather fish my own eyes out then go back to someone who brings out the worst parts of me let alone doesn’t want me. You may think I’m harsh or unfeeling, but I know enough people with the toxic-ex-streak to say it’s ultimately a choice. Perhaps we don’t choose who we miss—even the ugliest people we’ve loved are missable—but we choose what to do with the missing. We choose to get on the platform, to dial the number, to see them again, to knock. And in that, the train starts roaring, ready to chew-chew down the avenue of bad habits, self-hatred, and destruction. You won’t be able to stop it either, the engine room is sealed the moment you get on. And the red line on the graph plummets. If someone isn’t there to pick up the pieces they broke inside of you, they are not worth breaking for over and over again. It’s not easy to let go of something when you become addicted to the self-loathing, but no one will save you. At the end of the day, whether you walk in shame or drink it up with your pals the next day, they will never know what it’s like to feel so broken. So how can you expect them to know how to fix you? No one will do it for you.
“How can you change someone?”
You can’t.
We become accustomed to familiarity—whether it changes it’s bedsheets once a year or twice a week—and begin to mistake it for truth. If it feels familiar and comfortable, surely it’s right. But if you put your hands long enough on the stove, it will stop feeling the hissing burn, and when your skin is blistering, you will feel nothing. Familiarity numbs you to whatever it is you’re subjected to. This also goes for the excitement. If you see your money doubling every day, you will soon reach a point of ‘not-impressed’ and stop checking your account altogether. Just because we become conditioned or used to feeling a certain way, that doesn’t mean it’s right
4. Love is NOT like a box of chocolate
We’ve established we need human connection in a previous point, part of that connection is love. Romantic love. My first word of advice is deleting your apps. Yes even that one. I didn’t have any experience with dating apps, I refused them for the longest time, but I downloaded them to conduct my own experiment. Do they work? My overall conclusion is: No. They don’t. No. A thousand times, fuck no.
If you met your partner on these apps, congratulations. You’re the exception to the rule, not the rule itself. It’s impossible to sum up a person on a profile, it’s impossible to make a decision off of a picture or two. Contrary to popular belief, we are not visual creatures. No matter how witty the prompts are, no matter how good of a conversationalist you are, it’s extremely difficult to form a genuine connection that lasts. What these apps do is put people into boxes, categories, and algorithm filtered nonsense. You start looking for your type, general notions that might spark your interest. Even when you find a match that perfectly encapsulates everything you look for in a person, there is very little chance it will go anywhere. Not somewhere, anywhere. The swiping becomes insignificant after a few profiles. You stop reading their bios and you don’t listen to the entire voice prompt. It’s habitual. It’s as easy as tossing a paper off the binder. There is no repercussion to swiping left, no confrontation, and no guilt.
When you have options presented to you, especially an infinite amount of them, you become more and more particular on what you choose. If you were presented with two chocolate bars, or even four, it becomes easy to choose which you prefer. When you have a thousand bars, you will carefully look at each one, take your time, before settling. Because when you make the choice to choose one, you also make the choice to eliminate the rest. So when you have matches coming out of your ears, it’s impossible to choose just one, and cut out the rest. You become particular on what connection you pursue, but you also become uninterested in finding it when the options are too overwhelming.
We naturally don’t want to make the wrong decision that ultimately we end up making no-decision. When you hold eye-contact with the girl in the bookstore, and feel the urge to say something, you ultimately decide to do nothing because it’s better than making a fool of yourself or reading her all wrong. Not making that decision in itself is a decision. Not making a choice has its own set of repercussions, it’s not prevention, it’s a decision.
My advice is this: make a fool of yourself and stop overthinking what you say during conversations. Don’t try to plan the perfect thing to say before speaking, find your words or thoughts as the conversation unfolds. The entire point of talking is to understand each other, you can’t walk in there having rehearsed the joke or pun. You can’t memorize your opinion on the movie before it’s over. Stumble, correct yourself, be authentic and vulnerable, no one will hate you for it. Stop objectively looking at other people, start connecting with them based off of what they give not what you imagine. Don’t jump to conclusions and interrupt. This is not to say that your brain won’t try to fill in any gaps with fantasies, but don’t let it run amok. You have the power to potentially form something with time, it doesn’t need to be instant and you don’t need the red line to plummet when they leave then hit the roof when they’re present. That’s not healthy or sustainable. Talk to someone you felt something for. Even if you leave and hate yourself for not making a move, go back. Always try.
5. “This saves the day, the other goes away”
I’ve began to collect information—no, hoard information. There’s been an inexplicable, over saturated market of advice videos on the internet. So much so, it’s fed into the dead internet theory. (You may argue that this essay itself is part of that decaying cancer.) We consume media, mostly unproductive and mind-numbing, but there is a portion of it that is help advice, dating advice, love solving, needles debates, arguments, fascism, or gender-hating information. It’s okay to consume this information, but it’s also not meant to be consumed in its entirety. I’ve seen a skyrocketing number of videos and clips that are pushing narratives on young men and women, and the information is just…accepted. All of it. And then it’s implemented by every single person who watches it. Their entire knowledge on the subject only extends to the parameters of the video or page, nothing prior or beyond it. It’s a figment opinion off a larger idea, but people only digest that little crumb.
You can read books, watch videos, lectures and ted talks on whatever it is you’re interested in, but you also need to discard or question whatever doesn’t align with you. You cannot shape-shift after every influential thing you consume, you become just another version of somebody else. You need to filter things in and out. It’s okay to say that this point of view, this perspective, doesn’t align with you. It’s okay to reject and separate pieces of information. I’ve seen a massive burst on media centered around hating the opposing side—not just in politics, but even among people. There is nothing wrong with debates, but the media hates real debates. It’s boring and isn’t nearly as problematic as it should be to be entertaining. People watch it, then reuse the arguing points without fact-checking or reading more. It’s a recycled gig.
The point of information overall is to decide which is worth taking in and which should be thrown out. Books, news, columns, essays, and everything else is the same way. It’s made free for everyone, it’s made to be out there. The algorithm is not your psyche, you’re supposed to create your own filter.
6. O Captain! My Captain!
Invest in some politics. I like to say I’m somewhat political, but that truly just depends on whoever is around me. It’s a scale, a spectrum. I’ve learned that to most people being political isn’t about being a literal activist or someone who is elbow-deep in the political world. When people nowadays say, ‘you’re political’, they mean ‘you actually know what’s going on in the world?’. Shouldn’t we all know what’s going on in the world? Shouldn’t we collectively at least read about it?
I used to deter from anything seriously political because I always disguised my ignorance with ‘I just haven’t read enough on the topic’, but I never really got around to reading about it. I’ve heard that phrase very often, it feels like a cop-out answer, and I would know because I religiously used it. I also told myself I would shut away politics because it caused me some anxiety, some uncomfortable coldness that I didn’t like to feel. But I know that the feeling of being unable to stomach another human’s torture is simply empathy. If you turn on the news and feel upset, or maybe cry, that’s a sign you feel something, why would you shut that off? Turning off the news channel or looking away when the newspaper’s front page is a child begging for his life in Gaza won’t make you immune to the feeling of sadness. It makes you ignorant. It makes you more unfeeling. You can’t condition yourself to stop feeling, and you can’t force yourself to look the other way because ‘nothing can be done’. The least you could do, for people who don’t have the option to turn the other way, is feel for them.
Read about what’s going on the world, at least know enough so that when you have a bowl of cereal in the morning, you feel grateful you could eat it. I’m not saying we should walk everyday with the heaviness of the entire world’s corrupt systems, I’m saying walk everyday knowing that somewhere else someone doesn’t have the choice to be mindlessly scrolling on their phone. It makes life more dimensional knowing you aren’t the only one that exists. I also know there is a large amount of ‘it doesn’t concern me’ voices that go around when politics is brought up. Had you been crushed under ruble, I assure you, you would want someone out there to know.
“If we could really feel, the pain would be so great that we would stop all the suffering. If we could feel that one person every six seconds dies of starvation (and as this is happening, this writing, this reading, someone is dying of starvation) we would stop it. If we could really feel it in the bowels, the groin, in the throat, in the breast, we would go into the streets and stop the war, stop slavery, stop the prisons, stop the killings, stop destruction…
… When we feel, we will feel the emergency: when we feel the emergency, we will act: when we act, we will change the world.”
The life of the Theatre by Julian Beck
To end this long essay, which I most likely will make a following part to, here’s a short list of things I recommend. Again. You can consume anything I recommend, but you also need to throw out what you don’t need. That’s what matters.
Justice: What’s the right thing to do? The morality of Murder. A Harvard lecture on the right and wrong. Really interesting to feel like you’re attending it. Makes you ask yourself questions.
The paper, Famine Affluence and Morality by Peter Singer in 1971. Discusses moral obligations to help the world, the people. Discusses charity, and giving back.
For poetry. This interview of Robert Frost is one that warms me. It’s so beautiful and calming to see how a poet sees the world.
Short video of a lawyer answering ‘how do you defend someone you think is guilty’. It’s brief, but I kept thinking about it from time to time. Really made me think about what we think is the absolute truth.
David Lynch is my favorite director. This is a video of him diving deep into his love for art, his genuine appreciation for it.
BASQUIAT's work ethic when it came to creating his paintings. If you like art or want to create it, this is a cool resource.
Please sign this Greenpeace petition to stop British-made weapons being used in Gaza.