Good anxiety
In the last stretch of BoJack Horseman’s run, Diane Nguyen gets the opportunity to work on the book she’s been meaning to work on her whole life: a memoir about her childhood. Diane is one of the most controversial characters on the show (this is saying something) but that is not the point here. I’ve always found Diane super relatable for reasons, most of which are covered in a season 6 episode, Good Damage.
When Diane tries to write the book, she finds that she’s not able to translate her memories into a book that anyone else will want to read. This is a feeling I can relate to even as I type these words. She blames her antidepressants first and goes off her meds but that doesn’t help her “get to her dark place” either. In the end, she ends up writing a YA book about the adventures of Ivy Tran, a girl who works in a mall and solves crimes. It’s fun, it’s light - it’s everything Diane didn’t set out to accomplish. This leads Diane to a spiral about “good damage”.
I related to this on multiple levels but also because I’ve been given a similar strain of advice wrt anxiety. Everyone is anxious to some extent but there is being nervous and then, there’s ANXIETY. If I were to create an anxiety scale, I’d put “feeling butterflies in the pit of your stomach” at 0 and “I am curled up on the ground and finding it difficult to breathe” aka a panic attack at 10. My anxiety peak is usually around 6-7 - “Something is pressing down on my chest and I find it hard to do anything so I have to sit here and just spiral”. Much like with other things, I don’t fall on the scale every single time in the same way.
I didn’t realise the label till I saw a therapist for the first time. The therapist taught me some coping mechanisms but also gave me the damning pep talk: so you’re anxious. You can use the anxiety to get ahead in life! Revise the document one more time! If you can’t sleep, read a book! I was also determined to view my anxiety in the same way so I started to use my “good anxiety”. Anxious about meeting someone? Clean the house! You can be anxious in a clean house. Anxious about the day ahead? Do as much as you can up front!
I was determined to use my good anxiety to get ahead in life. A lot of the time, laziness would trump the anxiety so I’d just be anxious without doing anything about it which, of course, made me anxious too. The pandemic, the lockdown and all its associated triggers, have shown me what BS this is. I am always anxious now about everything - anxiety about my job, anxiety about my career, anxiety about my health, anxiety about my parents, anxiety about my brother, his wife and daughter, anxiety about friends, anxiety about my love life, anxiety about eating food, anxiety about cooking food, anxiety about being so terrible at cooking food that you feel miserable even as you volunteer to make the meal, anxiety about fitness, anxiety about buying groceries, anxiety about the plastic bottles in my life, anxiety about being anxious because I live a good life and am just bellyaching all the time about meaningless stuff, anxiety about infecting my friends, anxiety about death, anxiety about not utilising all this “suddenly available free time” to produce good, meaningful content that justifies my existence and signals that I’ve made good use of the opportunities handed to me, anxiety about creating crap in the process, anxiety about creating only crap in the process, anxiety about not being able to create the crap also, anxiety about creating passable crap, anxiety about not properly utilizing my allocated free time to read a particular book or watch a movie so that I become more informed and educated, anxiety about actually spending it scrolling on Instagram (watching other people be productive while I just do poorly at a job that feels devoid meaning) watching a cook eat her boyfriend’s diet for a week (it is extremely triggering if you have strong feelings about papad toppings) or reading fanfiction or a romance novel even though it makes you anxious and angry (angry anxiety!), anxiety about taking up so much of my friends’s time talking about my anxiety…you get the picture.
I keep trying to channel my anxiety but I only get more anxious and miserable and convinced that I am so mediocre that I who have accepted my mediocrity cannot begin to fathom the depths of it. If it’s not good anxiety…then all of this is worth nothing. I am worth something but it’s so close to nothing that it doesn’t register on the scale.
I am unable to relax and get better so I produce more mediocre content and feel miserable about it. This article was the compromise I made - write about what is making it hard for me to produce anything that feels valuable. It might be good, it might be bad, it might add value, it might prove to you that I have none but it is something. So, thank you for reading this. You’re a good friend and I hope to make you feel similarly treasured some day.
I did not write this for your sympathy so even though it might be hard, please don’t feel sorry for me. Even if you do, don’t tell me you do - I don’t deserve it. I do live a good life and I work hard to remind myself of it. If you think I’m full of shit, that’s completely fine (don’t tell me about it though).
I wrote this because while good anxiety might work for you, please keep in mind that it does not also. When I posted on Twitter about “good anxiety”, people scoffed at the term and, to be honest, so did I. But it seems to work for some people, so…why not? I guess the point of this article is (and the advice I’d give to other people if they’d come to me is): let’s be respectful of people and their feelings. Not everything has to be capitalised on. Sometimes, a feeling is just a feeling. You don’t have to use it or kill it. You can just be.