Anxiety as a Rational Response (Part 1)

Most people I know have suffered from anxiety or depression or both at some time in their lives. In my own case, it began many years ago when a close family member became depressed and anxious, and back then we had no idea what we were in for!  We both did the best we could, but as I am sure many of you know, depression can drop like a dark cloud on your soul. It robs you of your ability to see things clearly, your motivation for almost everything; it turns everything grey and flat and horrible. 

You look for causes, for reasons for feeling this way, and blame often ends with whoever is closest, including yourself.  Your parents, siblings and friends don’t fare much better. They don’t understand why you’re in such a funk. They’ll tell you to get over yourself, to get a life, to pull your socks up, and every other soulless cliché they can think of. This makes you feel even worse because you just can’t!

You cast around your mind and decide it was your parent’s breakup that did it, or your stupid inability to keep up at school, or that slimy “friend” who talked about you behind your back. There has to be a reason.

Finally, you give up trying to find out why and just succumb because, well, what’s the point? You can’t fix it, no one can….

Then they start at you, trying to “help” you.

“Get some fresh air!”

“Go for a walk!”

“Exercise is the best medicine!”

But you can barely lift your head off the pillow, so how can you?

You make an effort by getting a part-time job at the local store, thinking that the money and the outside contact might be good. And it’s OK at first, but then one day you find yourself standing frozen solid in the middle of unpacking and stocking – unable to move and suffering a wave of sheer panic!

You don’t go back to the store anymore, you don’t ring in sick, you just can’t do any of it. Your panic was so vast and so real, and now it threatens at every turn. So you sit in your room with the curtains drawn, making yourself even more miserable by surfing the internet.

It was hard to deal with – for them and for me. And at that point, I was yet to know my own anxiety and depression. I had no inkling of what lay in store for me.

The story goes on for many years, as I said, with many trips to the local doctor, the psych doctor, psychologists – and lots of different medications. More about meds in another post (posts!), but let’s just say at that point – say around 10-11 years ago (2008/9-ish?) – the shrink’s solution to a medication not working was to increase the dose. More and more, until you turn into a zombie, put on weight, and feel like even more of a blob.

I’m pretty sure the state of psychiatry is much the same nowadays. But as I said, more on that to come in future posts. For now, I just want to explore the idea that, instead of depression and anxiety being simply a “disorder” or disease, that it might actually have been the most rational way of coping at the time. The more I think about this, the more sense it makes. Let me explain.

I was watching one of my favourite TV shows on cable the other day – Gentleman Jack – and, (full disclosure, since I am non-hetero-oriented, or “bi” if one really needs a label) I find Miss Anne Lister incredibly powerful and damn sexy as well! It’s a great story about a strong woman born into a time (Victorian England) that was at loggerheads with her ambitions to be and do much more than become a sweet, young wife of the landed gentry.

In those days that were well before the first telephone or electric light or automobile were invented, people used candles and oil lamps to light the dark, and took horse-drawn carriages to places when walking there was too far. And they communicated by letter. Letter! And while there was a postal service of sorts, the mail train wasn’t to arrive until 1830, and so most of the mail was delivered by carriage in the public mail system, or in the hands of servants. And people wrote with pen and ink!

Pen. And. Ink. Amazing!

Now I’ve been a huge fan of period dramas – especially those of the Jane Austen variety – for many years, but it was not until I witnessed the exchange of letters in Gentleman Jack that I was struck by just how much had changed between then and now.

Don’t get me wrong. I am definitely very pro-technology and all that. Well, obviously. But I don’t want to give the impression that I think people are more depressed and anxious now because of it. That is NOT at all what I’m saying here.

Let’s take a look at an average day in the life of Miss Ann Walker – the very well-to-do object of Anne’s affections. She would awaken at a decent time, having no employment to attend, and would be dressed by her lady’s maid before taking breakfast – all prepared by servants - with her aunt, who lived with her. Given the elaborate dress at the time for landed gentry, it would have taken some time to get all dolled up, but not too much effort on her part, I wouldn’t imagine.

After breakfast, she might take a stroll around the gardens, perhaps oversee what the gardeners were doing – or she might look at fabric swatches for new curtains or a new dress - before returning to the dining room for lunch, again prepared and cleaned away by servants. The afternoon might involve a visit to or from some neighbours or other friends travelling through; she might open the mail and help her aunt decide on the menu for the following week. On a busy day, she might go to see her solicitor to sign papers, or her doctor for a tonic.

Finally, dinner, then relaxing in the parlour to play the piano or read, until it was time for bed. Not exactly a taxing day, either physically or mentally.

Again, let me emphasise that a lack of busyness does NOT necessarily lead to psychological well-being, a fact we know anecdotally from watching many a period drama in which the  lady of the house is overcome and emotionally distraught (think Wuthering Heights, Sense and Sensibility, etc, etc…). Indeed, Miss Walker herself suffered from a psychosomatic illness (as described by her doctor).

Let’s fast forward to today, and pretend we are – not even a grown woman – but your average university student. Depending on where you’re located, you might have been able to defer your tuition fees, but you still have to live, so on top of your studies, you have a part-time (or even full-time) job. So let’s look at your average day.

You wake at 6.30am because you have a lecture at 9am and parking is too expensive (if you have a car), and it takes 45 minutes to an hour to get from home to campus. The school you went to never taught you life skills, so you don’t really cook, and breakfast is toast and peanut butter or leftover pizza and maybe a coffee on the go. You were up late last night studying, so you start to doze on the bus, listening to your favourite tunes. Pretty soon, your phone starts beeping, reminding you of the appointments/stuff you have to do that day, or there are texts or emails. Another beep signals an Insta post, and up pops a gorgeous photo of someone looking perfectly made up and so thin and happy. You look  down at your own poor attempt of mid-range jeans and t-shirt, no makeup, and instantly feel daggy. All morning it’s texts, Instas, social media posts, emails, taking lecture notes, slogging across campus from one class to another, a lunch of something generic from the food court, followed by more of the same, as well as catching up with friends, stopping at the shop for groceries on the way home, hitting the gym, going for a run (girl’s gotta keep in shape), more Instas, texts, eat while working on your next assignment, call your mum/sister/grandma, then fall asleep watching some bad Netflix original wondering if you drank enough water that day. Then you wake up and do it again.

And that was a good day. Sound familiar?

Then there are the pressures – to get a degree, then a job, but to make sure you travel as much as you can, which means you have to work as much as you can to get the money. Girl’s gotta go to Europe/America/Thailand at least once while she’s at uni, right? Don’t forget all those Instas. And you’ve got a degree, so you can’t just get any old full-time job. All your friends are moving into proper careers – like lawyers and shit.

And what about relationships – do you have one? If not, what’s wrong with you? Are you thin enough? Too thin? Too fat? Is that a pimple? OMG, why do you have curly hair?? Are you even alive if you haven’t been to the brow bar recently and had your nails SNS’d? And that Black Milk dress cost way more than you could afford, but hell, you had to wear something half decent to the hen’s night, right?

And then there are those YouTube millionaires – where the fuck did they come from and how did they do it seemingly overnight?! Thank God for Bob Ross, or you’d be a bloody big mess after watching yet another ‘tuber show off their new Range Rover Deluxe.

It’s easy to see how any point along that timeline could lead a person into a massive state of anxiety…. And that’s a person who has it together enough to get all that done in the first place.

The point is, it’s almost crazy NOT to become anxious with life hitting you in the face like that. And it’s not the technology, not even social media. Rather, it’s the way life has sped up so enormously over the past 50 or so years. Some (many?) people just can’t run that fast.

Of course, there have always been anxious and depressed people… I was a depressed teenager in the 1970s and my life wasn’t anywhere near as complicated as that. Though to be fair, I don’t recall any of my friends, or really anyone I knew being anxious and depressed like me.

And this leads me to the other thing. Not fitting in. But that’s for Part 2. J