My anxiety, Nigel's version

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Lauren Oyler recently published a new book of essays that I finished last week and really enjoyed. She’s definitely something of a misanthrope, and her writing comes off as .. Not sour, exactly. Not mean. I guess austere is the word. She’s a millennial who’s unhappy and jaded, but too young to be jaded in the Fran Lebowitz Everyone-Is-a-Mess-and-I-Find-That-Amusing sorta way. It’s a little darker and more cynical than that. Anyway, one essay in particular, titled My Anxiety, was excerpted in The New Yorker and I liked it and it seemed worth riffing on.

Oyler is a terribly anxious person, and she spends the essay digging into this. How is she anxious? Why? Is she too anxious? Is her preoccupation with this condition the source of her anxiety in the first place? As she writes, “Naturally, I am not merely anxious; I am also very sad. The two are, for me, inextricable: I get anxious that I’ll get sad and sad that I’m so anxious.” Which, I mean.. hello, hi. Relatable, girl.

Late afternoon walks along the lakefront are good for when you’re anxious.

The thing is .. I, too, am probably fairly anxious. But who knows. Am I more or less anxious than you are? That’s like asking if we both see the color blue the same way. I prefer the term “neurotic” over anxious. “Anxious” implies an energy or tension that comes with the constant feeling of impending doom. Squirrels and rabbits are “anxious.” Really I just think I’m in my own head a lot and torturing myself with thought, but it doesn’t go anywhere, and so from day to day I’m not really all that anxious. I can sit still and be ok, usually.

I’ve always been able to sleep relatively well, so I think that’s a big part of it. Even those times when life has been profoundly not great.. when I’ve gone to bed at night with a colossal sense of dread, knowing that as soon as I wake up in the morning, I’ll be sick to my stomach dealing with this awful Thing again, and the day is going to be miserable — I’ve still had roughly eight hours where I’m out like a light and not thinking about whatever it is. So that’s huge. I’ve never dealt with persistent, debilitating insomnia.

That said.. the neuroses still creep in there, don’t they? I sleepwalk when I get particularly anxious about things. I’ll get up in the middle of the night and start digging through closets while still very much asleep. Then I partly wake up, confused by all the stuff I’ve pulled out onto the floor and unsure what’s real or not. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s because I’m preoccupied with something.

The dentist has told me I grind my teeth at night, but I think they tell that to everyone. I don’t think I really grind my teeth. This is also a very common thing that people who grind their teeth often say. I do know I’m neurotic about my teeth, though, and if I have a true honest-to-god “phobia,” it’s going to the dentist. Truly it’s something I’m just genuinely scared to do, it’s hard to even talk about, and I try to take excellent care of my teeth as a result.

Nights when I don’t sleep, though, boy. I am utterly useless if I had less than my regular 7.5 hours and I need to sit in an office quietly focusing on work the next day. Three drinks on a weeknight, followed by six or fewer hours sleep and the next day I’m slow, sad, and completely unmotivated. Those are the days when I really am fragile, and even though I’m generally not one to cry (almost never!), a day running on too little sleep is a day when I’ll stare off into space with no purpose at all and the tears feel just a fraction of an inch below the surface. I don’t think I used to be like that. This isn’t even “anxiety” that I’m describing so much as it is an inability to self regulate. But it knocks me on my heels enough now to where I frankly don’t want to be out doing stuff — I don’t like pushing myself out there on weeknights if I can help it. I’m trying to overcome that though. I think I probably stay in too much.

Black and white photos are good for conveying anxiety.

Which, of course .. that’s like, 80% of my anxiety right there, right? Other people and doing stuff. I want to join, I don’t want to feel left out, and I also don’t want to feel like I have to join and I would rather have some alone time. But do I even belong with people in the first place and what does it mean to fit in anyhow? I replay conversations in my head, and fixate on some dumb thing I let slip that I’m sure the other person took the wrong way. I think I generally don’t show enough enthusiasm when talking to people. I will fall without a moment’s hesitation into a spiral about whether people like me or whether they’re just being nice. When meeting new people, I forget names and faces way too quickly, but then I think I do a little better at this than some, so I’m willing to go easy on myself for this one. I’m probably in the 30th percentile, when it comes to remembering people? Not great, could really stand to do better. I also find casual hugs kind of exhausting. Like.. if we’re actually close friends, an occasional hug is nice. But walking up to a group of six or eight people I know? I’d prefer to just say hi. The everyone-must-hug thing feels too forced. And I worry that I act like it’s forced — I telegraph some level of annoyance with my half-assed hug — and therefore I come off as cold and unfriendly.

Yeah.. touching is weird for me. I guess that’s a particular neurosis I have. I just don’t like to be touched. Or I do like it, but sometimes I don’t, and I can’t expect people to be able to intuit which times are which, because even I have trouble figuring that out. My standard refrain in this situation is just “don’t touch me,” but that’s too crude a way of putting it. I’m like a cat in that respect. Touch is fine, even nice maybe, but … I’ll always be just slightly tense about it.

One touch I am clear on though, is I hate touching strangers on the train in particular. Like.. those seats on the CTA cars are all WAY too close together for most average-sized people (to say nothing for above-average sized people). Now admittedly, riding the train often makes me sad, not because it’s too often slow and too often smells terrible (though those things don’t help). Mostly the train just forces me into a captive, confined place with me and my own thoughts and a bunch of strangers I’m trying not to touch and I find it hard not to be upset by that. I rarely ever sit down on the train, unless there’s an empty seat next to me, and even then, once someone sits in that seat and I’m wedged between people, I’m jam up against someone and we’re touching and I hate it. It’s worse when that person then wants to look at their phone (which is nearly always), because inevitably now their elbows are sticking out, and they’re jamming themselves into my space.

Also, yes. Phones are another thing I’m anxious about, of course. I’m not deeply lost to the churning, dead-eyed brain rot feed of TikTok, Twitter, or Reels or anything. I’ve done my best to wall myself off from all that. But physically holding my phone, just texting, knowing I have to respond to a text, posting a thing, trying to find something in my email or pull up an app to do a thing — it’s enough to trigger a noticeable increase in my heart rate. I start to sweat a little, and I feel antsy. I worry that I just physically look at my phone too much. I worry that I flip through it as a muscle reflex, for no reason other than my brain requires stimulation, and this thing I pick up 200 times a day is just sitting right there, always within arms reach. I didn’t use to do that, and now I do do it, and even if I can’t articulate the exact harm it’s causing, I’m sure it’s bad. I want to throw the damn thing into Lake Michigan and forget I ever had it, but then my friends would all be texting each other and I wouldn’t get those texts and I’d feel left out and be anxious for that reason.

Let’s try not to think about this too much.

I think my moments of real despair are infrequent, but they do happen and I don’t like it. When I was younger, I never really thought that adults had angsty, stuck-in-their-head emotions, unless they were artists or Sylvia Plath-types who just felt emotions all the time. But now I’m solidly middle-age, and fuck me if I don’t really, horribly, terribly feel bad from time to time. Like just, curl in a ball and feel the full weight of all my life’s miserable failures kinda bad. I’ve never seen a therapist about this, and I’m not saying I’m dead set against the idea. But I’m also not convinced that a therapist would help, either. Like .. I don’t think I’m in denial about anything. I’m not trying to Avoid Talking About My Problems. Look at me, right here! Talking about my problems! I just .. talking things out one-on-one has never really helped me, even with minor stuff. I’m a work-through-it-on-my-own kinda person, and I do work through it, and maybe it takes time and maybe I do some writing, or I seek out some needed distractions or a re-set or whatever. But I don’t want to talk to a clinician. I would only fixate on the clinical experience itself rather than the thing it’s ostensibly supposed to help me with, and well.. how would that be any good? Maybe this is why I think I’m maybe not all that anxious to begin with. If I were genuinely anxious, I’d know that I need to seek out the help, but I don’t, so maybe I’m just not.

On the plus side, I think I’ve stopped getting anxious about politics, though maybe that cuts both ways. Is it my duty as a good lefty liberal to be more anxious than I am? Like .. I lived through 2016 and 2020 and all of that like everyone else. It was really not great! And this is an election year, too, and of course I care about it. But I’m also not willing to really torture myself with what ifs or read the next terrible article about how fucked we all are. I hope things are ok. I will vote and do what I need to do. But if things aren’t ok, my worrying won’t change that, and .. I mean I dunno. My anxiety anymore is just centered closer to home and my own experience. I can’t quite get worked up over what’s on tv or the internet in the same way I used to. I’m not saying I won’t freak out something horrible if November goes badly. I definitely will. But I’m not signing myself up to be pre-exhausted by any of that. I’m choosing to focus elsewhere, and that’s something of a new approach for me.

I guess if I had a long-term anxiety that I find myself coming back to as a theme, it would be anxiety about getting old — and specifically anxiety about losing energy and being too tired to do stuff. I just don’t want to feel tired. I don’t want to feel disengaged, or like I can’t keep up. If I could feel motivated to *do stuff* all the time, and always be intentional with how I use my time, then I’d feel ok about things. But my anxiety creeps in when I fall short of that — when I get too tired, too sleep deprived, too unfocused, and I just lose my edge. What was it I was going to do with my weekend, exactly? Where did the time go? What’s my plan here?? Why did I take all this "me” time and then not enjoy myself and instead just feel useless and unfocused? That’s when the anxiety monster goes to work within my brain and everything goes off the rails a bit. I want to keep up. I want to stay in the game. I’m worried that growing older is just a steady erosion, each day in tiny, unmeasurable amounts, of my ability to hang. That’s it. That’s really what it comes down to for me.

Lauren Oyler closes out her anxiety essay by ruminating on the anxiety of being too confessional about all this. And I think that’s totally fair. Maybe none of this was worth saying at all. Maybe it’s a massive over-share, and I should rein it in. But .. maybe it’s also a useful exercise? I don’t think the things that make me anxious now are the same things that used to make me anxious when I was younger. In fact, I’m sure they’re not.¹ But I don’t have access to the well of anxieties that 20 year old me or 30 year old me was carrying around, so I’m not even sure what the evolution has looked like. That’s how anxieties work — they’re just in your head until they’re not, and then they’re replaced by new anxieties. Reflecting on these things is worthwhile (and cheaper than a therapist), so .. that’s about as much as I can say about all that. Thanks for reading.

1. Ideas for future anxiety-related posts (not that I’m saying I would necessarily write them, just saying that these are anxieties that didn’t quite make the cut with this one) include: anxieties over sex / being gay (that one’s largely resolved, maybe?) / generalized anxieties about my physical appearance / parents and my relationship to home (that’s still a big one) / how to make the best use of vacation time / how to have a healthy relationship with work time / recreational drugs and how I get hung up about them / making friends / losing friends / losing touch with friends / writing, this blog, and any attempt to write anything, ever. Other than that, I’d say I’ve got it all pretty much under control.