Writing while anxious

Lessons from Sheila Heti

My stomach has been turned in knots for weeks. I described it to T the other day; outwardly I’m less shaky now than when this episode began, but a few weeks in, and there’s still a clutch of pain around my heart, as though I’m having a low-level heart attack all day long. There’s a fist clenched behind my stomach, tightening the fibres within me whenever my mind wanders back to the thing that is making me anxious. I cannot escape it; my mind is looped into it, seemingly forever. I don’t know how to break it other than moving with it with grace and a reluctant acceptance.

Compounding the anxiety is the fact that it makes me sleepless. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. Usually I drift off fine, but then wake up with a slapping heart around 3.30am, my mind back on the loop from which it managed to drift for just a few short hours. 

I can’t write because I can’t think of anything else. When I’m shopping, eating, conversing, working, it always seems to be there, hulking at the edge of my vision. I want to write, something, anything, though it feels frivolous to not direct absolutely all of my dregs of attention and energy into the thing that is making me anxious, so I stop writing for a bit. I think about writing with far-off longing and feel guilty, then that adds some weight and shape to the ball in my stomach and it drops even further into me. 

I go to Berlin with B in the middle of this. Our main agenda for the trip, as we repeat to each other in increasingly frantic texts, is swimming and reading, lounging and sunbathing. We want to walk and be at leisure, feel water on and over our bodies. We have been working for far too long, we reassure each other. We are overworked, overtired and in desperate need of a break. On the way to the station to catch a train to the airport, I still can’t quite forget about the thing that’s making me anxious; in fact, my anxiety dredges up something else that I might have forgotten to do for it and my stomach flips over yet again. I start going back through emails that are several years old in order to find missing pieces of information that will help me resolve this anxiety, then the train pulls up and B sticks her head out. She is burbling and excited for our holiday; I want to be, but the anxiety ball has been inflated with yet more worry, so I have to apologise and shut off for a bit, making notes on my phone of reminders of things to do as soon as I’m back to tackle this head on. She is understanding, sits next to me, a silent comfort to my tangled energy.

Our time in Berlin feels both too brief and also just right: five days to unwind, stretch ourselves out, sleep deeply (finally). We swim in various lakes and pools around the city, even when the weather has other ideas for us; we emerge shivering and blue but a bit happier. I joke that I gravitate to cold water like straight men to the Wim Hoff method, and every time I get in up to my neck and launch myself off, I feel a little newer. We spend most of our time walking up and down Mehringdamm / Kreuzbergstr. I fantasise seriously about moving here, even look up the average cost of rooms for rent. ‘How to move to Berlin uk brexit’ inches further up my search history as I return to it often while here. Instead of being anxious, I drink slim half pints of light German pilsner, I try to remember my school German, I sing along with the 80s classics playing on the radio in secondhand shops. 

Anxiety retreats from me for a few days. I sit in the airport and it begins to remember who I am, curling itself around me again like a spurned lover who believes themselves wanted. I typed the first half of this draft sitting at the gate, watching the sun set over the planes. I feel a bit more normal. Thank god, I sigh to myself.

Since being home, I read Motherhood by Sheila Heti, a book riddled with anxieties and depressions and PMS and arguments and hurts and confusions. In it, Heti / our nameless 30-something narrator puzzles through exactly whether or not she really wants to have a child, teasing apart dreams and social pressures. The ‘action’ of the book (if there can be said to be any action, as it’s mostly introspection) takes place over the course of several years as the narrator gradually approaches 40, when she can finally stop worrying about whether or not to have a child and let biology make the decision for her.

Reading it in the remaining fug of my extended period of anxiety, I was struck by how anxious the book itself felt, and yet how it had come into existence anyway. Heti had found a way to write through the uncertainty; in the book, her narrator flips three coins to get yes/no answers in the vein of the I Ching. A note at the front of the book explains, ‘by flipping three coins six times, one of sixty-four states is revealed and a text elaborates their meaning. […] In the pages that follow, three coins are used—a technique inspired by the I Ching, but not the actual I Ching, which is something different.’ On the next page: ‘in this book, all results from the flipping of coins result from the flipping of actual coins.’ Passages emerge with the narrator wrestling with her own thoughts to italicised answers of yes or no, forcing her to switch directions and excavate something new from her unconscious. She frequently consults mystics and tarot card readers, searching for an external source that might be able to help her find the answers to her questions. None of them offer anything definitive, and some of the answers they do provide are a little ridiculous, even to our narrator, but they form a paving stone in the path to where the book ends in a state of settled acceptance.

At the height of this anxious period, and during many past bouts of anxiety, I have done something similar. I consult tarot cards, I look for signs. I journal incessantly, as if this kind of writing will get me to a place where I can write something else. Reading Motherhood, it felt new and validating to see that kind of working out on a published page, like seeing Einstein doing long division. Oh, I thought, maybe I was writing all along.

At one point, the narrator (also a writer) writes, ‘I feel too tired to keep writing this—drained, depressed, worn through. Thinking about children weakens my fingers, and puts me in a deep sleep, like smelling a potent flower. There are all sorts of gates to the truth. Sleepiness is one. I must fight to the other side of this exhaustion, this strange sleepiness, and know for myself what I want.’ Though we are ultimately talking about and feeling different things, I recognise the temptation to be pulled into the midst of a feeling rather than writing about it. Writing requires distance, a level of objectivity, that a highly strung and intensely involved emotional state like anxiety cannot allow by is very nature. These emotions keep us entangled in them. It takes effort, sometimes an unfathomable superhuman one, to ‘fight to the other side’ of them in order to do something like write.

At the end of the book, the narrator characterises writing as a place of ‘no self’, where her body disappears and she is finally alone. ‘I am sitting here, writing, in order to discover the simple secret of my existence—what sort of creature I am.’ She describes writing as a cocoon-like state: ‘every day to go into it—into that cocoon of time and space, where everything stills, and my self becomes mush, and something new is formed. Inside this writing place, time and space are completely without form.’ Time and space and, crucially, the corporeal—the body is nothing, which means the effects wrought on the body by psychological states like anxiety or stress or depression are also nothing. I like this idea that to write you have to forget your body, forget its demands of you. You have to dissolve to write, and with it your anxieties and everything else are dissolved too, so that you are indistinguishable from what you were worrying about, so they don’t really matter anymore.

In Berlin, I went into a cocoon, went to mush. A happy mush, separated from my world by a gigantic land mass and a different phone signal. I came together again on the other side able to find a state of mush for myself, able to write again. This is by no means the first or last big period of anxiety that I will experience, but it feels like the most poignant because it has lasted the longest, and because I feel so inexplicably calm now on the other side of it. This is the calmest I have ever felt in my life, I’m sure. And now, through Sheila Heti, I have a blueprint for how to write through future anxieties. I don’t feel so anxious about potentially being anxious.