Anxiety for Highly Productive People

This is the first installment of A Cure for Fear, a new monthly column by Laura Turner on working, creating, and living with anxiety.

Just north of San Pedro Creek, under the perpetually cloudy skies hovering over the sandy crescent of Pacifica State Beach, there is a Taco Bell at the end of the world. It is a particularly good spot to enjoy a chalupa, or to recover from a panic attack you had while you were driving, say, from your home in San Francisco to meet your friend for lunch further down the coast. This particular panic attack was not qualitatively different from the others you have had except that the voices telling you you were going to die were a little louder and meaner than usual, and the smell of warmed tortillas mixed with the ocean’s brine as you rolled down the windows and gasped for air.

The fear is usually that you are not enough. It was then, that day in 2014 when you had done nothing and had nothing to be proud of. Fear overwhelmed you as regularly as a number 49 bus stopping every fifteen minutes on Mission Street, where you noticed that everyone else around you kept odd hours, too. Your world, in which leaving the house sometimes felt like an act of bravery, didn’t much overlap with the nine-to-five set, but somehow you had internalized all the pressures of the workaday world. Do more, be better, achieve greatness, respect, fame, adulation. Impress people. Dazzle them with your wit in 140 characters. Nothing less will do.

Earn your place in the world, the pressures say. They beckon to you from your self-contained ship, voices of twisted beauty luring you to rocky shores from whose folds you may never return.

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My friend Esmé and I meet for coffee every Wednesday morning at ten-thirty. The coffee shop sometimes plays old Christian contemporary hits, sometimes jazz, mostly 1990s power ballads. It is warm, peopled by a rotating cast of moms with children in strollers, nannies with children in strollers, and young professional women. Esmé always wears glamorous outfits reminiscent of 1940s movie stars; I usually arrive ten minutes late in yoga pants, with unwashed hair.

E wakes up early, so by the time we meet she is often onto lunch, a chicken caesar salad, no croutons. I have tea. We sit at a small table and gossip about writing, about Twitter, about how glad we are not to live in New York, about all the things we miss out on not living in New York.

Esmé is a writer who has late-stage Lyme disease; she teaches classes on “ass-kicking with limitations.” We often find ourselves talking about the relationship between productivity and anxiety, and how we especially feel the need to be “informed” in these troubled times. We use phrases like “self-care” and “duty as a citizen” and “resistance,” while confessing that our anxiety rockets sky-high with every additional minute spent on Twitter. What to do? Fear begets fear.

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“Anxious” sometimes means “ready” or “eager.” I am anxious to do, to act, to call my senator and read the news and see what else our new president has done and to find out what you think of me and to lose my self-centeredness. I am anxious to do whatever I need to do to not be anxious; to sit outside the Taco Bell by the ocean and breathe in the warm mixture of tortilla and salt. I am anxious to write a book about anxiety, and anxious again that it will be bad, which stops me from writing and creates more anxiety, more pressure. I am anxious that the world will go to shit and I will not have done my part. That is how anxiety evolves from eagerness to fear. From fired up to ready to stay in bed.

If the core of our identity is in producing, then it makes sense that we need to constantly be plugged in. My production can only be as good as the latest data, which I get mostly not from the newspaper that is delivered to my door every day but from a website teeming with Nazis and white supremacists and Christian assholes, sometimes all the same person, shouting over one another to be heard. Knowing everything becomes an act of professional self-preservation, and takes on an almost righteous hue for me. This isn’t knowing so that I can help or be responsible for my neighbor; this is knowing to be right and knowing because I am addicted to certainty. This knowing may be productive, but it is rarely fruitful.

The Psalms have been a particular balm for me in these anxious times. “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?” the Psalmist asks. When Christianity has been replaced with feel-good false unity or sold its soul for a seat on the Supreme Court, it’s good to remember that God has always been comfortable with despair and its cousin, joy. “Choose joy” sounds trite; it makes a nice wall hanging but a complicated moral philosophy. Yet joy is often a willful act of defiance, needed now perhaps more than any time in recent memory. Keah Brown wrote about this beautifully in her essay about black women and resistance: “We can’t fight and resist if we are not at our best, and being at our best means taking breaks and finding joy amid all of this.”

Call it self-care, sure, or call it life, but a soul is a thing that requires tending. The soul is not quite interchangeable with “heart” or “mind,” or any other word we mean to denote only the “spiritual” part of a person. In the words of the philosopher Dallas Willard, the soul is the entire inner person, not detached from bodily life but inclusive of it, as well as heart and mind, thought and motivation, feeling and judgment. An untended soul drifts toward inertia.

But what does my soul benefit from being “productive”? Am I any number of inches closer to God because I wrote an essay that was praised by someone I desperately wanted to impress? What is the moral imperative to produce?

These questions are all tricks to say that I have no idea what the answer is. I know that when I am anxious, I often think I can produce my way out of it. I have an uneasy relationship with productivity, thinking my anxiety will be placated if I just do enough big things.

*

“It’s easier said than done to accept who we really are and make art out of that,” George Saunders told a crowd of writers in Michigan last year. He talked about how he came to see that who he was—his soul, essentially—would be the thing that would drive what he wrote. There was no honesty for him outside of that.

There is no honesty for me outside of admitting that I am an anxious person, anxious to please and anxious to hole up at home and avoid all expectations, just as I am anxious to exceed them, anxious for you to find me charming and anxious to avoid all the consequences of being imperfect. How does a person like that, a person like me, join in the resistance? I don’t know. I try. I grow weary of trying.

It’s been awhile since I’ve had a panic attack. That counts for something, after years of therapy and exercise and medication. The Taco Bell is still there, a salty respite at the end of the world. What does the future hold for any of us? So much uncertainty and fear, and so little resolution.

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