Making the Beast Beautiful: Ambitions, Breakdowns, and Pandemic Anxiety
“I yearn for a complete sense of self; I’m not sure it’s something I
can find or something I just have to wait for. I want to be authentic. I yearn
to find the real me. I feel I am missing a connection with myself … I want to
have yearning and be in this life. Everything seems to be fractured, rather
than unified as my gut tells me ought to be the case. This stems from a
yearning for the world to make sense, to fit together. I yearn for life
direction and purpose … I want to know the real me, even if I have no idea what
the real me is. To know the connection to a bigger force. To know that the
universe has got this one. It burns at me every day to know that everything I’m
doing makes sense.”
—Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety
Oh hi! How are you? It’s me! Are you there, anxiety? It’s me, Jeffrey. Are you still there, lovely blog readers? I hope so! It’s been far too long. So long, in fact, who knows where to even begin?!
I figured we could start with this screencap brought to you in part by Russian Doll, which pretty much sums up how I feel most of the time but especially now, during… what is it called again? Oh yes, that’s right. An unprecedented global freaking pandemic. Feel free to take a moment to scream endlessly into the void as I’ve been doing every day since this nightmare began.
The last time I wrote something here feels like five years ago, and not just because so much has happened with the world in 2020 so far and it’s only May. (It’s only goddamn May. Jesus Christ.) Back in January, a.k.a. when roaming freely in the world wasn’t partially illegal, I heard back from an application I had submitted to website called PopMatters that was looking for new music critics. At the time that I applied, I was feeling very unfulfilled in all aspects of my life—school, work, ambitions, mental health, etcetera… take your pick. I’m obsessed with feeling fulfilled and important.
I hated my university classes and I hated my part-time job. And even though I will likely always struggle to put my faith in the universe (especially now—once again, Jesus Christ), it had my back at the end of 2019 when I found a new, more convenient part-time job and my school semester, as they all tend to do, ended gracefully. But during my time feeling unfulfilled, I decided that I needed to feel in control of some part of my life. I can’t control shitty classes or if that employer will call me back, but I can decide to take the reins and reach for something I want, so I applied for the PopMatters opening last October. I also didn’t have control over whether they would contact me back either, but in terms of honoring what I want to do in life (write), I figured it was a step in the right direction. I love music and had been reviewing music for other people’s blogs and my own for the last few years, so I figured it was time to decide if it was something I wanted to pursue “professionally.” I also submitted an article to Introvert, Dear—a website catered to introverts and highly sensitive people—around the same time.
Christmastime last year, as I already discussed, was incredibly difficult for me. At the time I just thought I was missing my grandmother more than usual and it was making me sad, but in retrospect, I don’t think that was entirely the case. I was sad because I didn’t feel fulfilled or happy with myself, and Christmas is the worst time to be feeling this way because the entire world is forcing you to feel happy and cheerful. I’ve felt down during the holidays before, but last year was especially hard. Cut to the first week of January, when I heard back from Introvert, Dear saying they’d love to publish my article (6 Tips for Surviving Anxiety as an Introvert). A few days later, the PopMatters editor emailed me to say they were interested in having me join their team of freelance contributors. THEN a few weeks after THAT, another website called Spectrum Culture contacted me to ask if I would be interested in reviewing music for them as well. Not to mention that on top of all these exciting personal developments, I started being trained on the cash at the store where I had begun working part-time. So many exciting things! Happening all at once! Looking back, I’m really surprised it took me as long as it did to have half a nervous breakdown.
One might ask why being trained as a cashier at a store was so stressful for me, and it wasn’t only that the hours were a little bonkers and didn’t compliment my life schedule as I had figured they would. To anyone that knows me well, it’s no mystery why I avoided working in customer service as long as I did. And it wasn’t that being a cashier made me anxious. I was more than willing—I wanted to be important, knowledgeable, answer phones, and type codes into a keyboard ridiculously fast like I’ve observed cashiers doing my entire life. I want everything from life, even when it might not suit my talents or strengths as a person. I’ve spent so much of my life hiding away from the world and being afraid of growing up and taking chances that, in the last few months, my thing has been to power through and pretend my anxiety doesn’t exist. I got so tired of my mind and my thoughts slowing me down that I had this weird notion where I thought I could just wake up one morning and all of my anxieties would be gone forever. I’ve felt it, discussed it, released it, so now it’s gone forever. In a perfect world, yes, I would love for it to work like that—but as anyone can tell you, anxiety does not work that way. My anxieties definitely weren’t gone, and as always, I had to learn this for myself the hard way.
Around this time of exciting but stressful personal developments, I read Sarah Wilson’s book First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, about her own lifelong experience with anxiety. For anyone who suffers from anxiety, I can’t recommend it enough—and I know that it worked for me because of how annoyingly uncomfortable it made me. It was like a session with a really tough therapist who won’t let you look away from the ugliness any longer. But as she wrote, she learned that anxiety is like a beast that we have to make beautiful. Maybe we have to curl up with the things that plague us and turn them into something understandable so that we might finally be able to see them in a new light. “The more anxious we are, the more high-functioning we will make ourselves appear, which just encourages the world to lean on us more,” she writes. “We have an original anxiety that stems from feeling we’re missing something, that there’s more to life, that we need to know where and how we connect with life. But to sit with our true selves causes another anxiety, a lonely, exposed anxiety. Then, if we flee this sitting with ourselves, we encounter the anxiety of, well, knowing that we’re fleeing ourselves and truth.”
Cut to the last week of February, “reading week,” when everything started to come to a head. I had a week off to myself, and yet when I tried to relax, the anxious voices only got louder. “But I’m not anxious!” I told myself. “So why the fuck do I feel this way?” The stress and anxiety got so bad that I couldn’t sleep at night, and this only began when I actually had time off to be alone with myself—which pisses the shit out of me, since there’s nothing I love more than my alone time. I didn’t even think for a second that it could be the fact that I was juggling school, writing reviews and articles for multiple publications (including Book Riot, where I became a contributor last summer), AND a still fairly new part-time job, where nothing is perfect on the first try. Nope, it couldn’t have been any of that that was making me anxious! I was just being irrational. Knock it off.
Looking back, I hate that I had become a person who thought that the answer to overcoming anxiety was “powering through” and telling myself I wasn’t anxious when I clearly was. But as Sarah Wilson points out, that kind of ruthless, anxious hustle and bustle is rewarded largely in our Western world. “Anxious behaviour is rewarded in our culture. Being high strung, wound up, frenetic and soooo busy has cachet,” she says. “I ask someone, ‘How are you?’ and even if they’re kicking back in a caravan park in the outback with a beer watching the sunset, their default response is, ‘Gosh, so busy, out of control, crazy times.’ And they wear it as a badge of honour. This means that many of us deny we have a problem and keep going and going. Indeed, the more anxious we are, the more we have to convince ourselves we don’t have a problem. This is ironic, or paradoxical. And it seems awfully cruel.” So, so awfully cruel. I hate it.
Jump ahead to the first weeks of March. I was trying to get my head back on straight again without getting so anxious that I could barely eat, sleep, or do any sort of activity that usually sparks joy. For that first week, it seemed to be going fine. But then I was put back on those bonkers work hours which I had managed to mangle my way out of by early February—hours, by the way, that I had specifically requested several times to my managers, merely because they were hours that had worked with my last two part-time jobs and I figured they would work well here, too. I was wrong, but I also felt bad saying that the hours didn’t work for me because I pretty much made clear I wanted them. The girl whom I’d negotiated a switch with had quit and had her last shift, putting me back on the cash on Saturday mornings. (SCREW Saturday mornings on that cash, just by the way.)
“Okay, it’s fine!” I started telling myself. “I’ve gotten so much better on the cash in the last month. It won’t be as stressful.” Once again, dear reader, I was so wrong. The stress and anxiety that was still lingering in the air began choking me once more, and I barely slept the night before that last Saturday morning shift in March. “Did you go out last night?” the owner inquisitively asked me upon seeing my face that morning. “Oh, no,” I replied, trying and failing to laugh it off. “Just tired.” How I made it through that shift I’ll never know, but I stuck around at the end of it to just tell the owner to take me off Saturdays. I wasn’t going to attempt another switch with someone. Just leave me with my one other day a week so maybe my stress level will go down and I’ll sleep at night. I referred back to how he asked me why I looked so tired that morning. “This is just stress and anxiety on my face here,” I said. “I really need a break.” It was either a break or a breakdown, so I chose wisely. But the stress had already taken its toll, and after another sleepless night that Sunday, I stayed home from school the next day, quite literally unable to do anything but lay in the fetal position and watch Modern Family reruns all day.
Little did I know that this lovely thing called motherfucking coronavirus was just days away from being declared a global pandemic. By Friday, March 13th—the day the music died—schools had been shut down for the remainder of the month, and a week after that, the mall where I work was mandated to close. Not only that, but my safe haven known as the public library was closed almost immediately, as were any other places that myself and others like to frequent to get out of our heads. I spent the first few weeks of quarantine not really feeling any different than I would have if we hadn’t been in lockdown: I was tired, overworked, and in need of some recovery time. Thankfully, and while I wouldn’t want to ever thank the universe for giving us COVID-19, the universe had my back on this one, too.
I’m not saying I’ve completely benefitted from spending already two months in quarantine, leaving the house only to go to work one shift a week (unfortunately for me, the store where I work was deemed an essential service). I, like many others, embraced the fact that the government said everything would be closed at least until May, and then we would reassess. I never thought the virus would be gone by now, but I did hope that it would be better. But we don’t know anything. We’re all just figuring this nightmare out day by day, including the government.
My mental health has certainly not benefitted from quarantine in many ways, since it’s not healthy for anyone—let alone those with mental health issues—to be locked up inside with nothing but the background noise of their own thoughts. I’ve learned that, historically, I’m way too good at listening to the voices in my head, and it always feels easier for me to wallow in their echo instead of trying to get around them. Also, it’s HARD. It’s difficult when the thing that’s causing the most anxiety right now is this giant looming health threat that none of us—government included—have control over. We can follow depressing guidelines until we’re blue in the face, but it still won’t give us control. Relinquishing control is hard and exhausting for everybody. Please remember that, and give yourself a break if you can.
But on the other hand, I think everything grinding to a halt and being on pause for the last two months has been beneficial for everyone’s mental health in ways we will not fully comprehend until everything opens up again and life begins to restart. I was talking with my friend Kat about this a few weeks ago—someone who has held my hand through SO many of my mental health crises, it’s actually quite embarrassing—and she said that despite how anxious we might feel about not being able to go to the library, or the gym, or to get a haircut, we also have to acknowledge that we’re all subconsciously benefitting from this time away from the world. Yes, not everything can pause and it’s ridiculously frustrating to have to work around this monster of a virus, but there’s hidden value to having this time alone with ourselves. It’s SO uncomfortable, don’t get me wrong. I actually miss the drama of my own internal anxiety, because at least I had some control over that. But beyond the un-comfortability there is value—so as much as we’ve all had enough time to rest by this point, maybe start to think of the unhealthiness of your previous hustle and bustle. Take this opportunity to think of who you don’t want to be when the world does reopen. All I know is that I no longer want to be someone who takes on too much work for the sake of feeling fulfilled and worthy, and who pretends he’s not anxious when he really is. SO fucking anxious. All the damn time.
Tell me, who do you want to be when the world reopens?
“Many of us with anxiety don’t look like we’ve got a problem because outwardly we function ludicrously well. Or so the merry story goes. Our anxiety sees us make industrious lists and plans, run purposefully from one thing to the next, and move fast upstairs and across traffic intersections. We are a picture of efficiency and energy, always on the move, always doing. We’re Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh, always flitting about convinced everyone depends on us to make things happen and to be there when they do. And to generally attend to happenings. But beneath that veneer we’re being pushed by fear and doubt and a voice that tells us we’re a bad husband, an insufficient sister, we’re wasting time, we’re not producing enough, that we turn everything into a clusterfuck.”
—Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety
—Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety
Oh hi! How are you? It’s me! Are you there, anxiety? It’s me, Jeffrey. Are you still there, lovely blog readers? I hope so! It’s been far too long. So long, in fact, who knows where to even begin?!
I figured we could start with this screencap brought to you in part by Russian Doll, which pretty much sums up how I feel most of the time but especially now, during… what is it called again? Oh yes, that’s right. An unprecedented global freaking pandemic. Feel free to take a moment to scream endlessly into the void as I’ve been doing every day since this nightmare began.
The last time I wrote something here feels like five years ago, and not just because so much has happened with the world in 2020 so far and it’s only May. (It’s only goddamn May. Jesus Christ.) Back in January, a.k.a. when roaming freely in the world wasn’t partially illegal, I heard back from an application I had submitted to website called PopMatters that was looking for new music critics. At the time that I applied, I was feeling very unfulfilled in all aspects of my life—school, work, ambitions, mental health, etcetera… take your pick. I’m obsessed with feeling fulfilled and important.
I hated my university classes and I hated my part-time job. And even though I will likely always struggle to put my faith in the universe (especially now—once again, Jesus Christ), it had my back at the end of 2019 when I found a new, more convenient part-time job and my school semester, as they all tend to do, ended gracefully. But during my time feeling unfulfilled, I decided that I needed to feel in control of some part of my life. I can’t control shitty classes or if that employer will call me back, but I can decide to take the reins and reach for something I want, so I applied for the PopMatters opening last October. I also didn’t have control over whether they would contact me back either, but in terms of honoring what I want to do in life (write), I figured it was a step in the right direction. I love music and had been reviewing music for other people’s blogs and my own for the last few years, so I figured it was time to decide if it was something I wanted to pursue “professionally.” I also submitted an article to Introvert, Dear—a website catered to introverts and highly sensitive people—around the same time.
Christmastime last year, as I already discussed, was incredibly difficult for me. At the time I just thought I was missing my grandmother more than usual and it was making me sad, but in retrospect, I don’t think that was entirely the case. I was sad because I didn’t feel fulfilled or happy with myself, and Christmas is the worst time to be feeling this way because the entire world is forcing you to feel happy and cheerful. I’ve felt down during the holidays before, but last year was especially hard. Cut to the first week of January, when I heard back from Introvert, Dear saying they’d love to publish my article (6 Tips for Surviving Anxiety as an Introvert). A few days later, the PopMatters editor emailed me to say they were interested in having me join their team of freelance contributors. THEN a few weeks after THAT, another website called Spectrum Culture contacted me to ask if I would be interested in reviewing music for them as well. Not to mention that on top of all these exciting personal developments, I started being trained on the cash at the store where I had begun working part-time. So many exciting things! Happening all at once! Looking back, I’m really surprised it took me as long as it did to have half a nervous breakdown.
One might ask why being trained as a cashier at a store was so stressful for me, and it wasn’t only that the hours were a little bonkers and didn’t compliment my life schedule as I had figured they would. To anyone that knows me well, it’s no mystery why I avoided working in customer service as long as I did. And it wasn’t that being a cashier made me anxious. I was more than willing—I wanted to be important, knowledgeable, answer phones, and type codes into a keyboard ridiculously fast like I’ve observed cashiers doing my entire life. I want everything from life, even when it might not suit my talents or strengths as a person. I’ve spent so much of my life hiding away from the world and being afraid of growing up and taking chances that, in the last few months, my thing has been to power through and pretend my anxiety doesn’t exist. I got so tired of my mind and my thoughts slowing me down that I had this weird notion where I thought I could just wake up one morning and all of my anxieties would be gone forever. I’ve felt it, discussed it, released it, so now it’s gone forever. In a perfect world, yes, I would love for it to work like that—but as anyone can tell you, anxiety does not work that way. My anxieties definitely weren’t gone, and as always, I had to learn this for myself the hard way.
Around this time of exciting but stressful personal developments, I read Sarah Wilson’s book First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, about her own lifelong experience with anxiety. For anyone who suffers from anxiety, I can’t recommend it enough—and I know that it worked for me because of how annoyingly uncomfortable it made me. It was like a session with a really tough therapist who won’t let you look away from the ugliness any longer. But as she wrote, she learned that anxiety is like a beast that we have to make beautiful. Maybe we have to curl up with the things that plague us and turn them into something understandable so that we might finally be able to see them in a new light. “The more anxious we are, the more high-functioning we will make ourselves appear, which just encourages the world to lean on us more,” she writes. “We have an original anxiety that stems from feeling we’re missing something, that there’s more to life, that we need to know where and how we connect with life. But to sit with our true selves causes another anxiety, a lonely, exposed anxiety. Then, if we flee this sitting with ourselves, we encounter the anxiety of, well, knowing that we’re fleeing ourselves and truth.”
Cut to the last week of February, “reading week,” when everything started to come to a head. I had a week off to myself, and yet when I tried to relax, the anxious voices only got louder. “But I’m not anxious!” I told myself. “So why the fuck do I feel this way?” The stress and anxiety got so bad that I couldn’t sleep at night, and this only began when I actually had time off to be alone with myself—which pisses the shit out of me, since there’s nothing I love more than my alone time. I didn’t even think for a second that it could be the fact that I was juggling school, writing reviews and articles for multiple publications (including Book Riot, where I became a contributor last summer), AND a still fairly new part-time job, where nothing is perfect on the first try. Nope, it couldn’t have been any of that that was making me anxious! I was just being irrational. Knock it off.
Looking back, I hate that I had become a person who thought that the answer to overcoming anxiety was “powering through” and telling myself I wasn’t anxious when I clearly was. But as Sarah Wilson points out, that kind of ruthless, anxious hustle and bustle is rewarded largely in our Western world. “Anxious behaviour is rewarded in our culture. Being high strung, wound up, frenetic and soooo busy has cachet,” she says. “I ask someone, ‘How are you?’ and even if they’re kicking back in a caravan park in the outback with a beer watching the sunset, their default response is, ‘Gosh, so busy, out of control, crazy times.’ And they wear it as a badge of honour. This means that many of us deny we have a problem and keep going and going. Indeed, the more anxious we are, the more we have to convince ourselves we don’t have a problem. This is ironic, or paradoxical. And it seems awfully cruel.” So, so awfully cruel. I hate it.
Jump ahead to the first weeks of March. I was trying to get my head back on straight again without getting so anxious that I could barely eat, sleep, or do any sort of activity that usually sparks joy. For that first week, it seemed to be going fine. But then I was put back on those bonkers work hours which I had managed to mangle my way out of by early February—hours, by the way, that I had specifically requested several times to my managers, merely because they were hours that had worked with my last two part-time jobs and I figured they would work well here, too. I was wrong, but I also felt bad saying that the hours didn’t work for me because I pretty much made clear I wanted them. The girl whom I’d negotiated a switch with had quit and had her last shift, putting me back on the cash on Saturday mornings. (SCREW Saturday mornings on that cash, just by the way.)
“Okay, it’s fine!” I started telling myself. “I’ve gotten so much better on the cash in the last month. It won’t be as stressful.” Once again, dear reader, I was so wrong. The stress and anxiety that was still lingering in the air began choking me once more, and I barely slept the night before that last Saturday morning shift in March. “Did you go out last night?” the owner inquisitively asked me upon seeing my face that morning. “Oh, no,” I replied, trying and failing to laugh it off. “Just tired.” How I made it through that shift I’ll never know, but I stuck around at the end of it to just tell the owner to take me off Saturdays. I wasn’t going to attempt another switch with someone. Just leave me with my one other day a week so maybe my stress level will go down and I’ll sleep at night. I referred back to how he asked me why I looked so tired that morning. “This is just stress and anxiety on my face here,” I said. “I really need a break.” It was either a break or a breakdown, so I chose wisely. But the stress had already taken its toll, and after another sleepless night that Sunday, I stayed home from school the next day, quite literally unable to do anything but lay in the fetal position and watch Modern Family reruns all day.
Little did I know that this lovely thing called motherfucking coronavirus was just days away from being declared a global pandemic. By Friday, March 13th—the day the music died—schools had been shut down for the remainder of the month, and a week after that, the mall where I work was mandated to close. Not only that, but my safe haven known as the public library was closed almost immediately, as were any other places that myself and others like to frequent to get out of our heads. I spent the first few weeks of quarantine not really feeling any different than I would have if we hadn’t been in lockdown: I was tired, overworked, and in need of some recovery time. Thankfully, and while I wouldn’t want to ever thank the universe for giving us COVID-19, the universe had my back on this one, too.
I’m not saying I’ve completely benefitted from spending already two months in quarantine, leaving the house only to go to work one shift a week (unfortunately for me, the store where I work was deemed an essential service). I, like many others, embraced the fact that the government said everything would be closed at least until May, and then we would reassess. I never thought the virus would be gone by now, but I did hope that it would be better. But we don’t know anything. We’re all just figuring this nightmare out day by day, including the government.
My mental health has certainly not benefitted from quarantine in many ways, since it’s not healthy for anyone—let alone those with mental health issues—to be locked up inside with nothing but the background noise of their own thoughts. I’ve learned that, historically, I’m way too good at listening to the voices in my head, and it always feels easier for me to wallow in their echo instead of trying to get around them. Also, it’s HARD. It’s difficult when the thing that’s causing the most anxiety right now is this giant looming health threat that none of us—government included—have control over. We can follow depressing guidelines until we’re blue in the face, but it still won’t give us control. Relinquishing control is hard and exhausting for everybody. Please remember that, and give yourself a break if you can.
But on the other hand, I think everything grinding to a halt and being on pause for the last two months has been beneficial for everyone’s mental health in ways we will not fully comprehend until everything opens up again and life begins to restart. I was talking with my friend Kat about this a few weeks ago—someone who has held my hand through SO many of my mental health crises, it’s actually quite embarrassing—and she said that despite how anxious we might feel about not being able to go to the library, or the gym, or to get a haircut, we also have to acknowledge that we’re all subconsciously benefitting from this time away from the world. Yes, not everything can pause and it’s ridiculously frustrating to have to work around this monster of a virus, but there’s hidden value to having this time alone with ourselves. It’s SO uncomfortable, don’t get me wrong. I actually miss the drama of my own internal anxiety, because at least I had some control over that. But beyond the un-comfortability there is value—so as much as we’ve all had enough time to rest by this point, maybe start to think of the unhealthiness of your previous hustle and bustle. Take this opportunity to think of who you don’t want to be when the world does reopen. All I know is that I no longer want to be someone who takes on too much work for the sake of feeling fulfilled and worthy, and who pretends he’s not anxious when he really is. SO fucking anxious. All the damn time.
Tell me, who do you want to be when the world reopens?
“Many of us with anxiety don’t look like we’ve got a problem because outwardly we function ludicrously well. Or so the merry story goes. Our anxiety sees us make industrious lists and plans, run purposefully from one thing to the next, and move fast upstairs and across traffic intersections. We are a picture of efficiency and energy, always on the move, always doing. We’re Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh, always flitting about convinced everyone depends on us to make things happen and to be there when they do. And to generally attend to happenings. But beneath that veneer we’re being pushed by fear and doubt and a voice that tells us we’re a bad husband, an insufficient sister, we’re wasting time, we’re not producing enough, that we turn everything into a clusterfuck.”
—Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety
(Recommended listening for this essay: “I Love Me” by Demi Lovato, “Homecoming Queen?” by Kelsea Ballerini, “Anxiety”
by Julia Michaels & Selena Gomez, “Don’t Let It Break Your Heart” by Louis
Tomlinson, and “Wonderful World” by James Morrison)
Follow It's Not That Deep on Instagram — @areyouthereanxiety — and listen to my playlist of mental health songs on Spotify and Apple Music
Follow It's Not That Deep on Instagram — @areyouthereanxiety — and listen to my playlist of mental health songs on Spotify and Apple Music
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