Anxiety is a Universal Language
a letter on anxiety ☼ two poems to pull you out of it ☼ a visual recipe for a cleansing and cathartic sob
on anxiety, everyone’s shapeshifting friend
Anxiety. Everyone has it, even if they think they don’t. I am unsure if anxiety is something that arrived at the steps of my brain at a certain point in time and then multiplied with age, or if it is something that has always been there. If, over the years, I picked up the sounds required to speak its tongue, to hear it through the frame of a busy mind and hold space for its dialogue, as if I were listening to a friend on the phone.
What if this happens? What are the pros and cons of doing this? Of not doing this? What would I do in Circumstance A or Circumstance B or Circumstance C or Circumstance The Absolute Worst? Am I doing what I need to be doing? Am I getting fat? What will happen if I do get fat? Am I making the right decision? Am I spending my time the way I am supposed to be, in a way that will lead to my ultimate best future? Am I living my life how people are supposed to live it at 25, 29, 37, 45, 53, 70? This might happen or this might happen or this might happen, and what then?
It took me a long time to recognize that many of the questions that circle our hearts like a pod of hungry sharks—the only fish to feed them the fear they incite—are products of the same question: Will I be okay? Will I be good? Will I be enough? We do not need to ask ourselves these questions in the literal sense to wonder about them on a subconscious level. Worrying about the future is different than planning for it, and tends to arise when we forget the answers to similar—though fundamentally different—questions:
Am I okay? Am I good? Am I enough?
While we may know to answer yes, it is different to know all three affirmations with such a force that quiets the mind’s chatter to the point where we can hear where we are (birdsong, the hum of a distant freeway), feel where we are (warm summer air, the ground beneath our feet), and be where we are (noticing our fathers and mothers and friends on the couch, people we love sitting there right next to us, our faces in the mirrors reflecting the lives we’ve lived—things to not take for granted).
If we know these things without being prompted to answer: that we are okay, that we are good, that we are enough, and that all three of those are unconditional, are affirmative without this amount of money or that pretty house or this kind of relationship or that kind of body, we can spend less time worrying about the could-be’s and soak up the fruits of the present.
I do not think most of my friends would describe me as an anxious person. In fact, I have always been told the opposite, that in times of conflict or inconvenience I tend to keep a calm face. I recall several instances in which people have thanked me for staying grounded in stressful situations—that being around me helped them to settle down. And I am, for the most part, an optimist (or used to be…prior to my awakening around the ways in which Western society is designed, first sparked by the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, though continues to grow every year). Yet, when I look back at various parts of my life and study how I am feeling in the present, it is clear that anxiety has always been a close neighbor, if not a guest in my house.
I often find myself attempting to optimize my life. This, in and of itself, is a response to an anxious mind, a coping mechanism around the fear that I may not be optimizing my life and, as a consequence, may one day find myself unhappy. The idea that a happy or unhappy life is built by previous decisions that are inherently right or wrong means that every decision we are in the process of making can pose a significant impact on our future. All of that is debilitating, and can lead to what many call choice anxiety.
Should I go here? Should I do this? Should I be with him, should I be with her? Should I go out tonight or stay in? But what if I regret it, what if I regret that? Choice anxiety haunts decisions of all sizes, yet it always yields the same result: Focusing on the could and the should steals our time away from what is. And even when we do decide, it makes us live in doubt.
I am writing about anxiety out of a desire to share, with everyone and anyone, how normal it is. And to stress, especially, that anxiety means nothing about us. We are not weak-minded thinkers or neurotics by nature. We are everyone who lives in a world in which we are taught to worry, in which we are reminded that if we do not worry we will end up broke on the street somewhere in the middle of Bakersfield. Because if we are not thinking about our future and striving for more, we will be left without enough.
Generalizing, this is the effect of capitalism. Some people generalize that it is the effect of social media, the attention economy, or intergenerational trauma, all of which are difficult to unpair with capitalism and the western imperialist frameworks that the Global North uses to keep the system intact. It is near impossible to be enough in a world that constantly reminds us of what we do not have. Advertisers do not make money reminding us of all the ways in which we are truly rich, with a roof over our heads and friends to call at night and things to be excited for: a sweet apple, a crush, a book we like. We are taught to want more and need more to the point that we no longer know what “enough” looks like.
But that does not mean that we need to feed the illusion, to worry to the ends of our lives. Many of the things we were taught are only helpful until they are not.
In the chapters where anxiety writes itself in, where worry attempts to edit the narrative of my life around what could happen as opposed to what is happening, I like to describe it. I like to describe it until its font grows smaller and its shade disappears.
It feels like a curling of the stomach and a drying of the heart. It feels like a headache in the shoulders, a frown in the spine, a remission of saturation from the frame. It sounds like a tired crow and tastes like nothing, looks like an empty plate before I could notice the food and smells like a gas leak I can’t find in a house without windows. Sometimes it feels like the foot of a gargoyle the size of an oak tree pressing through my chest. Sometimes it feels like a cry that crawls to the top of my throat and refuses to squeeze out, sits there like a mothball tangled in the esophagus, growing, growing, growing. Sometimes it looks like my reflection in the mirror, an angle of the face or the stomach I’ve studied more times than the screen of my phone. And then it is the screen of my phone, the flick of a thumb through moving visuals in search of something else, a feeling, a relief.
A relief that never comes from the phone but instead comes from meditation, or exercise, or writing. Or when I put on my favorite music and dance and scream and remind myself that I am a part of the universe and the universe is a part of me, and so: I am the universe. Not my fears or anxieties, but an expanse that contains them, amongst other things: joy, hope, curiosity. Not my wants or worries or the list of things I would like to do but a morsel of the excitement that sits beneath them, layers of a pleasant belief, always there, always aglow: that I belong here, that we all belong here, and that we are all meant to remind each other of that truth. We are here, living a slice of a life that will always last too short. Everyone says it goes by too fast. Let’s not make it go by any faster.
two poems to pull you out of a spiral
As promised, I am making Sleepover into a zine of sorts. ☺ Which means experimenting with different types of media. Here are two old poems I dug up (one from 2018, one from a few years ago) that remind me to be where my feet are. In zine fashion, I designed them into a postcard-ish collage, because why don’t we send each other postcards anymore?
tear-jerking glimmers from the internet (and AI)
Tearing up at emotionally-charged stimuli is one of my favorite activities. Lately, however, there haven’t been many movies or books or shows I’ve seen that have surged up the waterworks—UNTIL RECENTLY. Maybe my emotional receptors were amplified after seeing one of my best friends (Shauna) marry the love of her life (Andrew). Or maybe I am in a hormonal swing and am not aware of it, because I have never been aware of it, because even though men have hormones, the medical field seems to refuse to believe that men are susceptible to routine mood swings (which they obviously are). It is interesting that I said “they” instead of “we,” which highlights how I am apprehensive around grouping myself with the male gender at large—because men, generally, suck I do not like to generalize unless it is at my own benefit.
Moving on!
Apple’s AI-Generated Videos: There is something precious about AI-made videos derived from the libraries on our phones—the early kind of AI that isn’t all that impressive. Maybe I adore them because they remind me of a time before ChatGPT and Sora, before the era we now live in where AI surpasses the boundaries of what we thought was possible almost every week. The personalized videos generated from our Apple Photos libraries are cheesy, sentimental, and—at times—cringe. Which is why I love them. My mom sent me a few that were generated on her phone, all of which succeeded in pulling my heartstrings. Like, sure, Sora might be able to create a short film that looks Marvel-worthy, but the old AI knows what matters: Emotional music and the people we spend time with. The one below recaps my cousin Adrienne’s wedding:
Videos as simple as this just remind me that every moment we live becomes a memory. That every person we spend time with becomes a part of our past, and us a part of theirs. Sometimes it feels like I have spent the past twenty eight years attempting to decode this great mystery: How to realize how special everything is while I am living it, how to cherish the people in my life so much that they stay with me forever. It feels like I am searching for a way to express all of the love that prefaces everything everywhere, to see it, seize it, and share it, until something like a reverse Big Bang occurs, where the entire universe implodes and leaves the only thing there ever was: This, us, and the small opportunity we have every day to enjoy one other. To be pleasant, to take care of each other, and to celebrate the little things like watching ducks swim by in the spring.
Clips of Inside Out 2: I was surprised to find myself crying at a clip of a movie I have not seen, especially a clip that I only watched the first half of so as not to spoil the movie. Though I haven’t seen Inside Out 2, I already know it is going to destroy me. Looking at the comments beneath clips on TikTok birthed small streams down the sides of my cheeks. The recognition that we are all living a part of the human experience—that we all navigate things like Money and Anxiety and Hope and Grief—makes me cry out of awe. We are all here on this earth living until we are not; then the batons are passed on.
TikTok Premium: Recently, I’ve found myself on TikTok Premium, a phrase people use to describe the phenomena of finding high quality content buried in an otherwise generic feed. There are the comics that make your heart swell and the short videos that highlight the best moments from your favorite films (e.g. the video below, set to a quote from Past Lives):
And then there are the videos that might be better described as short films, where creators spend several months editing their material—as opposed to recording and publishing the same day—for a result that deserves an applause:
You’re scrolling through random rants, comedy skits, and trending songs—the majority of which are lo-fi, grainy, and filmed on an iPhone—and then, out of nowhere, a horizontal video appears and makes you believe in life again. ☷
With love,
Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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