What are the characteristics of an anxious mind? Here’s one: I’ve been sitting at my computer for 20 minutes deciding if I should write that first sentence. I’m anxious about how good the sentence is, what people will think about it, will it live up to my mostly self-created image of being a ‘good’ writer, will it live up to my mostly self-created image of being a ‘smart’ person, is it good enough to be the first sentence to an essay that will be as good as Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’ (is this a smart enough reference?), will I be interrupted as I write, post-interruption what do I need to do etc, etc, etc…And all this for the first sentence.
See, I’m already hating what I’m writing because I suddenly thought of someone who I feel shouldn’t be a better writer than me, yet is a better writer than me, and now I need to become a better writer than that person instantly by writing this absolute piece of freaking genius, this General Relativity of essays, this Wawrinka’s one-handed backhand of self-reflection, this Tesla Model S Plaid of Substack posts. And now with every analogy above, I think of 5 different people and what they would think of what I’ve written: will I be perceived as someone with a wide range of interests? Or someone who can’t make a half-decent literary reference (I am a writer after all)? Or what about Federer’s backhand? Am I being intentionally contrarian referring to Wawrinka’s backhand rather than Federer’s? Will the reference to Tesla give someone else the impression that I am an Elon Musk fanboy - and Elon Musk is a billionaire and we all know billionaires are evil resource vampires, stomping on the lives of the poor to enrich themselves. What about that one person who doesn’t get the sarcasm above and thinks that I really think billionaires are destroying Mother Earth? Now what about everyone I just alienated who takes this belief for granted?
Truly, when I really think about it I don’t really care about what most people think. But even deeper than what I think is true about myself, I obviously do. If I didn’t I would write prolifically and without worry. I would write anything I wanted, about anything I wanted, not worrying about quality or topic. I would write for tech websites, car magazines, Penthouse Letters. I would write poetry for small poetry presses, essays for anyone who would take them and film scripts for small-time film directors who have no idea what they want to make and will literally make anything out of desperation. I would write novellas in a month and novels in a year. I would tweet 10 times a day and post selfies on Instagram. I would write a short story every day just to see if I could do it.
Clearly it’s not just about what other people think. It’s also about me thinking of myself as a failure if I fail to do something that I want to do. So why is it that some people can fail to write a good short story hundreds of times and still keep trying to write a short story? And why does my mind jump from not liking something I’ve written to ‘you’re a terrible pathetic failure at everything you do don’t even try to do anything you’re a loser you’ve wasted 34 years of your life get a data entry job’ in an instant?
I wish I knew exactly why. I have a clue but that’s for another post and another time. What I do know for certain is the mind is so complex that I sometimes I cannot explain why I don’t do the things I want to do and why I do some things I don’t want to do and why I do some things I shouldn’t be doing. It is a vast, million-layered universe that has been forming ideas and impressions of things since I was 4 or 5 years old, all entangled, all interacting, all conflicting. And now it’s difficult to break out of the influence of all these little ideas and memes that make me relate to the world in a certain way and make me relate to myself in a certain way.
Another thing I know: an anxious mind is a mind that is afraid of the future. More specifically, it is afraid of future fear. And this paralyses the bearer of this mind because the bearer doesn’t want to be afraid and doesn’t want a future that might potentially be scary. And so what do you do? Either you do nothing or you do nothing new. And you get more and more afraid of the future till all you can do is be afraid. And then you hate yourself for not doing anything.
The only way to break out of this self-flagellating blackhole of anxiety is to shut down your mind and just do things. In my case it is to give my fingers instructions to write a number of words and then sit back and not let my mind get in their way and watch them as they churn out sentence after sentence. They may not be great sentences but at least they’re appearing. The alternative is to do nothing creative for the rest of my life: this is worse than death.
An Anxious Mind
The last two paragraphs are so relatable it physically hurts me in my chest.
PS: I would like to live in the parallel universe where Roshan posts selfies to Instagram.