TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to talk today about the subject of anxiety. It’s pretty much considered a negative thing in our world, a bad thing to have. Calm people, people who lack anxiety, are considered to be healthier, and people who have anxiety are considered to be troubled, have problems, or something not quite right about them. And I’m gonna argue with that.
Now, I’m not going to say that anxiety is the greatest thing in the world because I certainly don’t like it. I have a lot of anxiety often. In fact, last night I slept pretty badly, full of anxiety. My history of having anxiety goes way, way back in my life. In fact, some of my really earliest memories, I think even three, four years old, were hearing my mother tell people that I had anxiety. And somehow I knew what she was talking about. It was that I would get stressed out sometimes. And I don’t remember doing anything particularly odd or strange, but really it was that she was right. I did have anxiety.
But the way that she told it to people was that somehow I had a problem and that there was something a little bit wrong with me. And I was embarrassed by it. I knew enough that I didn’t like her telling people that, and it bothered me. It bothered me that she thought that. And later, though, I began to put the pieces together. It took until I was in my 20s and 30s to realize, wait a second, my anxiety was not a bad thing. It was actually, unfortunately and sadly, a really healthy reaction to the place that I was living in, the world that I was living in.
What it was, was that I had a lot of spirit. I had a lot of energy. I had a lot of honesty. I had a lot of passion. I was a curious, smart kid, and I loved to express myself. And I was living in a world that was very closed down, very emotionally shut down in a lot of ways. I was around a lot of adults who did not have a lot of emotional connection, connection with themselves, and weren’t very creative, weren’t very expressed. And what happened was that my expression, my passion, my creativity, my honesty, and my openness really confronted strongly with their way of living, and it wasn’t acceptable because I was in a much less powerful position as a little child.
And they were my parents. They were my world. They were my teachers. They were all these people around me who were people that had much more power, much more dominance than I did. And at some level, I learned that my being me wasn’t really acceptable. And yet I still wanted to be me. I couldn’t give up. I had fight inside myself. There was some part of me that just couldn’t not be me. I couldn’t give up. I couldn’t shut down. And because I couldn’t shut down, I kept expressing myself. And because I kept expressing myself, I really was not accepted. And there was the rub, and I had anxiety from it. It caused me a lot of stress.
So really, if I think, if I’d been a lot weaker, if I think if I just given up and stopped fighting for being who I really was, if I’d had a lot less passion, I probably would have had a lot less anxiety. In fact, I surely would. And what’s interesting is that still goes on in my life now. It’s like, why was I so stressed out during the night last night? Why was I so anxious? Well, yesterday I recorded a video, and it had a lot of really controversial subject matter in it. And I think, well, why would I record a video that had controversial subject matter? Do I like stirring up controversy? Is it something that I find pleasurable to bother people and piss people off? It’s like, no, quite the opposite. In fact, I hate it when I stress other people out. I don’t like causing conflict. I don’t like getting into wars and people leaving rough comments. I don’t like that whole thing.
What I like is to express what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling, my observations on the world. And when I am sharing my observations and my thoughts, the fact that some people might get rubbed the wrong way is not on my mind. In fact, often I try to be as polite as I can with sharing my ideas. They might not come across that way to the people who don’t like it, but I really am trying to avoid controversy. But I’m trying at the same time to be true to myself, to be honest about what I’m thinking and feeling. And also, there’s some part of me that really feels that what I’m thinking and feeling has value. And so I want to share it.
And also, I get a lot of positive feedback, not from everyone, but from quite a lot of people that do find some value in what I’m saying. And that helps give me enough feedback to say, keep going, don’t give up. Because even as a child, it wasn’t all negative feedback that I got from the world. I didn’t get entirely shut down. I just got partially shut down. But what goes on still in my life is that by sharing these honest ideas, it’s very easy because of my history, because of the reality of what I see, to anticipate that there is gonna be some pushback from the world, and it causes me stress.
I sometimes look at people, I guess you could say I admire them, the people that just put out really intense ideas and really don’t care about what other people think. Those are the people, like, it’s called icebreakers. They’re like the ships that go through ice and just, they have a very hard metal front, and it just breaks right through ice in the frozen oceans and frozen lakes. I’m really not one of those people. I think I’m much more sensitive and, in a way, soft. I don’t have a hard metal front, and I just can’t tune out the controversy that much. It really affects me very strongly, and so I get very stressed out by life.
Now, has that been my history ten years ago, twenty years ago? I’ve been an adult for over twenty years now. Then had a lot of anxiety all through. Well, in some ways, yes. In some ways, I have been committed to being myself, and not like a conscious intellectual commitment, but some sort of emotional commitment that’s been inside of me. I don’t know what you’d call it, in the guts of my being, in my soul, maybe you could say since forever, as long as I could remember, just this need to express myself and to express what I’m feeling and thinking through all sorts of different mediums, through art and music, through writing, through speaking. And it’s just caused me anxiety all the way along.
It’s interesting, though, because deep down, again, yeah, I will use the word anxiety. I have no problem with that. I just don’t really think it’s a problem. I don’t think it’s a pathology. I don’t think it’s a disorder. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I know it isn’t. I really know it isn’t. Yeah, it causes me problems. Yeah, I can mess up my sleep sometimes. But the inherent root of the anxiety is not, it’s not a disorder.
But I think of when I first started going to therapy. I was 26, 27 years old, and I remember the first time I went to a therapist where she had to bill an insurance company. She gave me a diagnosis. We actually talked about it, and she told me directly. She says, “Well, you know, I have to give you a diagnosis just to bill an insurance company.” That’s like, yeah, I really don’t care. It doesn’t make any difference to me what they think. So she gave me, and we talked about it, and she said, “No, how about let’s just give you the mildest diagnosis, an adjustment disorder.” And I thought, yeah, I’m not very adjusted to this very screwed-up world. I know how to function. I can fit in. I can work and do all that stuff, but the really deepest part of my being is not adjusted to this world.
So in a way, I could handle adjustment disorder, even though I got labeled with disorder. But so that went on for a while, and then I remember I was actually in Social Work school at this point.
Learning how to be a therapist, we were studying this thing called the DSM, which was the book of all the different diagnoses. It’s the Bible of Psychiatry.
So I got my bill from the insurance company, and I opened it up. There was a number code next to my diagnostic code that she was billing under, and I was like, “Oh, must be adjustment disorder.” I looked it up, and it said generalized anxiety disorder. I was like, “Oh, it’s like she told me that.” That’s not what she told me she put down as my diagnosis. I never would have accepted that. I never would have accepted being pathologized with anxiety. It was like that was a painful part of my history, and a big part of what I was going to therapy for was to talk about my history, to work out my history, to try to resolve it and come to terms with it, and actually to get away from a lot of the people that had caused me so much harm.
So I brought it back to her, the paper, and I said, “Look at this. This isn’t an adjustment disorder. I’m diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. Did you know that?” She’s, “Oh yeah, it’s just a generalized catch-all diagnosis. I just use it for insurance billing for lots of my clients.” I was like, “No, you can’t put anxiety down on my permanent record! I hate that an anxiety disorder!” I was really offended and hurt. She didn’t understand. She was like, “Yeah, it’s really not a big deal.” I’m like, “Well, maybe it’s three and four years old. You weren’t pathologized for having an anxiety disorder by your mom.” I was like, “It really bothered me, and it sticks with me to this day.” It’s like I really do not feel that I have any sort of anxiety disorder. I feel I have an anxiety reaction to living in a very screwed up, shut down, emotionally disconnected, emotionally dishonest, intellectually dishonest world where I’m in many ways the opposite of a lot of those things.
I see in a lot of ways the world is like a cult, and I’m outside that cult. You know, I’m partially in it because of how I was raised, because I live in the society, and me expressing who I really am just does not fit in with that cult. The cult fights back, and I get anxiety.
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