Reading React: Anxious about Anxiety
Thoughts on Samir Chopra's Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide (2024). Princeton University Press.
In my favorite novel of all time, Master and Margarita, the Master plunges himself into a madhouse after the Soviet literati rejected and vilified his work on Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ of Nazareth (not atheist enough for the Stalinist apparatchik). He later understands that his fear concerns something bigger than his work or anything that he could individually change: the political coercion, the anxiously modernizing Soviet society, and the bizarre and notorious apparatchik bureaucracy. He turns away from the world, the love, and the devotion of his lover, Margarita. In her anguish and suffering, uncertain about her lover’s condition, Margarita embarks on a magical — surreal — journey with Satan (Wolan) and his troops (including but not limited to a bloodthirsty fat cat named Behemoth). Her love for Master is so unbearable that she is willing to sell her soul to Wolan just to know if her lover is alive or dead. Both face different uncertainties, and they deal with their own choices accordingly – both possess a different spectrum of anxiety. For the longest time, I thought I was the devoted Margarita.
Master and Margarita are Reunited (A Master and Margarita mural in Sweden by Jan Persson, 1995).
My anxiety (both general anxiety and panic disorder) has always been my biggest shame. I simply do not know how to work around it – I am trying my best, and yes, progress is not linear. But some days are even harder than usual; it makes me paralyzed and confused. I often ask myself if I will ever be cured of this. Reading Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide by Samir Chopra (2024), I learned that my anxiety is not only a trauma response but rather a device that constitutes me or anyone. Seeing it philosophically, Chopra frames anxiety as a function inherent in human beings that deal with life uncertainties (predominantly concerning the end and the “purpose” of life, such as death, future, etc.). In sociology, it’s called risk management. Sociologist Anthony Giddens terms risk society as increasingly preoccupied with the future, constantly tinkering its way to safety and calculating risk. In a world that is increasingly becoming volatile (the global pandemic only opened up this can of worms), anxiety becomes one’s faculty to navigate life.
Life, after all, is full of uncertainties – one has no excuse to avoid them. A more compassionate way of seeing anxiety thus treats it as an inevitable dimension and even a constitution of one’s selfhood (p.106). Hence, Chopra joins the bandwagon of critical philosophers who depathologize anxiety. Although many strands of literature used in his book still frame anxiety as a “disease” (p.), Buddhism, existentialism, and Marxist alienation theory approach anxiety by not shying away from it. Chopra thus furthers such a framework by suggesting that anxiety is not a psychopathy that mandates medication unless necessary (when it becomes a danger to the sufferer and others). The baseline is that anxiety is here to stay, and it is hard to imagine living anxiety-free unless our consciousness is denied. One must face their anxiety instead of suppressing it with numbing medications. Two possible ways out of anxiety, according to this book, are as a way to invent oneself (ala existentialists) and an opportunity to radicalize oneself and others because of how anxiety is pretty much structured as well (ala Marxist).
Anxiety is a “hermeneutical relationship with the world.” Anxiety is me trying to hold onto life’s uncertainty and my helplessness. Our relationship with the world is interpreted through these anxiety-ridden eyes. Each act possesses a touch of poignancy in this relationship — my flight anxiety, claustrophobia, random jealousy, and disgust of inconsistency. It is how anxiety is ripe for opportunity in advancing oneself or even possibly others (p.77; p.203). At its core, it is phenomenological — I have to confront this pain and understand what it aims to tell me without any baggage to resolve it. In other words, anxiety should not, and cannot, be dissolved and easily replaced by the futility of “solution.” The only time when anxiety is no longer around is when one dies — or unconscious (p.118).
“Please just send me to a hospital,” I begged my parents once at 11 pm in March 2023. Tears soaked my shirt, and I could no longer feel my face. My poor parents were absolutely clueless about the concept of “panic attack.” They were so scared: a daughter raised to get her shit together 24/7 finally broke down the second time in front of them, and this time without external influences, they could no longer blame it on things that I put inside my body. They rushed me to the ER, and the doctor ruled it was my arrhythmia. When we went home, my father refused to let go of my hand, and my mother hugged me until I could sleep. For the next three days, I could not feel anything. Crying in front of my therapist exactly a year ago, I told her that my anxiety felt like “getting stuck in traffic, inside a clown car, surrounded by monstrous SUVs, on an eight-lane highway, going nowhere.” Anxiety feels like a bear trap.
At its best, my anxiety is there to protect me either from repeating mistakes, triggers, and danger (p.156). It helps me understand the level of my comfort. But this comfort is sometimes also based on the stagnancy of safety (p.173). It is comfortable because I know these responses well: solitude, single life, commitment aversion, coldness, stonewalling my emotions. I am still learning how to receive love, joy, and tenderness. For years, I avoided hugs, even from my best friends, because their warmth that had saved me was too overwhelming. A strike of sadness often looms in my head. How slippery is the slope between two peaks of safety and self-sabotage? The future looks so hazy to me, a constellation of gas yet to be a galaxy.
It took intensified therapy sessions to realize that my increased discomfort against uncertainties (that has led to massive and persistent anxiety) comes along with grief. After my father passed away, uncertainties felt like a punch in the gut. My last phone call with him before he fell into a coma was him reassuring me that he was going to be okay: within twenty-four hours, he was gone. Everything went so quickly; I have been processing it ever since. This man is among the extreme few who understand the (limited) range of my emotions. Things that I could not say, he found the words for me. It seems that I took his care and love for granted. It has been causing me great distress to assume that everyone is going to leave me one day, and I don’t get to thank them enough. By focusing on that assumption alone, I often forget how to be present and enjoy my existing relationships (friends, kind strangers). I start losing my way to “entertain uncertainties” (p.99). Overwhelmed by my own feelings, I withdraw mentally; my own head and this little studio of mine become my own madhouse.
Two psychiatric wards, multiple mental health centers, a rehab, and hundreds of Seroquel. Still, I sit down by the balcony like the Master, imagining a better life that feels so unreachable. My manuscript burns. I woke up in sweat even in the harsh cold days of Chicagoland. I started losing my trust in how anxiety could offer me a way to understand myself. Maybe Chopra is right, I am not interested to know what I am. Anxiety feels like an ultimate burden for me because I see it as a disease, and I need to cure and overcome it. I must not have an anxiety, or so I thought, -- an act of bad faith and inauthenticity, according to existentialist philosophers (p.81). “Do I really have to think too much about myself?” I complained once to my therapist when we discussed my upbringing and explored my recent anxiety attack. She looked at me gently. “That’s what you need to do after you live off someone else’s dreams and expectations for twenty-seven years.”
I want to be gentler with my anxiety. Reading Chopra’s book, I hope to learn how to see my anxiety as an invitation to gather my courage and voyage to the unknown. I am also exhausted from intellectualizing my feelings — my way of survival for the last twenty-nine years. After all, even Spock confirms that logic is just the beginning of wisdom instead of the end. I just want to celebrate my best friends’ smiles. Maybe I should see my anxiety through a curiousity: What does it try to tell me? Why do I have to think and feel that way? There is indeed a danger in asking such questions in dealing with anxiety, but anxiety is precisely where philosophy could “spring and blossom” (p.9). Questioning means you are an “anxious being” (p.10) – a way to engage with our anxiety and navigate this life between the joy of wonder and the terror of dread.