Anxiety by David Whyte

ANXIETY is the mask that truth wears when we refuse to stop and uncover its face. Anxiety is the disembodied state I feel when I pretend to put things right by worrying about them instead of truly conversing with them. Anxiety is the temporary helper going by the name of worry, who, when turned into our constant live-in companion, becomes our formidable jailor.

Anxiety means we haunt the body like an unhappy ghost from the past instead of living in it as a live anticipation of our future: anxiety creates the ghost-like sense of living timidly in our mortal frames so that we begin living in the world in the same way: as a troubled guest; a guest who does not believe they deserve the rest and hospitality that the body or the world can offer. Anxiety is the mind refusing to be consoled and nourished either by the body itself, or the world this body inhabits: anxiety is an extended state of denial; the refusal to put right something that needs to be put right, because putting it right means feeling real anguish, a real sense of the unknown and the need to change at a fundamental level.

Anxiety always tells us we are somehow just about to be injured by reality, by another or by the body itself: that nothing is to be trusted fully: our continued nervousness wasting the body’s powers by keeping up a heightened but unsustainable level of alertness. Anxiety is difficult to shed because anxiety always refuses rest and rest is where the answer to anxiety lies. Rest feels as if we are letting down our guard and refusing to defend what we instinctively feel must be constantly defended to the last.

Temporary worry is useful to us and allows us to identify and innumerate what has not yet been fully answered or done and therefore outlines what is important to us and what we care about: constant worry always goes over and over the same territory and becomes, in the refusal to move on, the anxiety that cripples: anxiety is the illusory state of non-attention where we imagine that the very worrying itself is a way of paying deeper attention. Anxiety actually becomes our unconscious way of refusing to go any deeper with the things we are worrying about.

Constant anxiety is an unconscious defence against what is calling us to a deeper understanding. Ever-present anxiety actually covers over and prevents me from feeling fully what I am worrying about. Constant anxiety is our constant way of not paying attention. Anxiety is the trembling surface identity that finds the full measure of our anguish too painful to bear, constant anxiety is our way of turning away from and attempting to make a life free from the necessities of heartbreak. Anxiety is our greatest defence against the vulnerabilities of intimacy and a real understanding of others. Allowing our hearts to actually break might be the first step in freeing ourselves from anxiety…

—excerpt from the essay, ANXIETY in Consolations II, available at davidwhyte.com