Data and Anxiety

Comic by B. Kliban.

I have been suffering from anxiety attacks for the past month.

What is anxiety? A tangled ball of thoughts that I can't seem to get out of no matter how much I struggle. A weight that makes my shoulders slump and my molars grind and my fingers twitch and my heart flutter in my chest. A worry that I cannot do anything about, that won't unravel itself, that has tangled itself knotted and confused around my fingers. An emptiness. A cloud. A drowning flood that I can never escape. Sometimes I'm fine and I forget about it completely and I wonder what I was ever afraid of, what I ever worried about. And then it will come again, a fire, a darkness, a switch being flipped.

Anxiety is an evolutionary mistake. My mind (already fast) goes into overdrive, mulling possibilities, rehearsing plans, calculating probabilities. My body gets ready to run, to fight, to survive. Back when my ancestors were threatened by tigers, epidemics, and pogroms, this anxiety helped them survive. It helped them anticipate the unexpected, and act with dispatch when true threats came.

So I inherited this anxiety. But I do not have tigers, epidemics, or pogroms to trouble me. And yet sometimes my brain reaches out and grabs something--something it is afraid of losing--and starts to worry about it, with the same fretful intensity that should only be reserved for those big dire things that can really kill you--those things whose eyes glint out at you from the dark opening of a primordial cave. And I will be trapped in my thoughts like a bug twitching in a spider's web.

It's hard to describe what the thoughts are like, because they are so annoying, so simple, so obviously wrong. But they come, and I can't stop them. I am not loved. I am not good enough. I should never have come to grad school. I have lost my chance for community, for affection, for real life. My girlfriend is going to leave me. My friends don't really like me. I have let down my family. I am a disappointment to my advisors, a secret joke in the halls of the History department, a pleasant fool. Over and over again. Endlessly echoing in the theater of my mind.

The thoughts won't go away. I sit there on my couch, my heart beating, my mind racing through them over and over again, replaying them like an afternoon re-run of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

The cause of this bout of anxiety is easy to identify. My fiancée left me a few months ago. Those emotional truths that had once seemed solid--that I am a good person, deserving of love; that the people I love will not leave me--seemed to have melted into air.

I know that this is not fair. I am still a good person, deserving of love; it is still unlikely that the people I care about will suddenly abandon me. Many fine, normal, attractive people go through broken engagements. But the dream-like nature of the worries makes them even more hard to deal with. Because they have very little fact behind them, I cannot grab hold of them and do something about them. Because they are inscrutable, they have become a grand, unsolvable problem, one which has come to take up my every third thought.

A few weeks ago I began an attempt to quantify my life. I wanted to boil my self down into numbers, data-tables, and vectors in order to find the hidden patterns underlying Brendan Mackie. Below are a number of data visualizations which help show what I'm going through.

I have learned a few things already from this project.

I am OK
Look at my daily ratings. There's a perfect 10 in there! None of the days merited lower than a 4.

I may be a bit broken now, but that has not meant that I cannot have wonderful experiences. And my bad days are, from the perspective of the carnage of human history, not super bad.

Friends Are Important
Days when I see friends--for lunch, coffee, or dates--are the best. Conversely, when I'm lonely I'm far more prone to fall into deep anxiety.

Anxiety Happens In The Morning
I wake up with anxiety. But as I go through my day and fill my head and heart with actual, real-life stuff, the anxiety passes.

Understanding It Helps
Being able to see my well-being marked in an impersonal line graph helps. See, here, this dip? This is when I let a whole Sunday morning go by fretting over whether someone actually liked me or was only pretending to. Look--this good day? That was when I made an effort to connect with my friends.

I know that tomorrow morning I will wake up and I will hold today up for judgement. Will I have let another day slip by, tortured by illusory thoughts? Or will I have tried to do something about it?

I'm curious about your comments. How do you deal with anxiety? What more can we learn about ourselves from data?

Oh my love it's a funny little thing.

Photo by Flickr user Andrew Ciscel

Mornings like this one, I wake up with a sense of inevitable dread. I’m afraid that all of my hopes will float by me unfulfilled, and then, what will happen to me? Will I curl up into a little ball? Will I become one of those bitter old men who walk the streets with loneliness like lead weights? And I lay in the warmth of my sheets, and think of how my day’s going to go once I cast off the duvet and throw on clothes, and from there I think of the next day month and week, and there’s something meaningless to it all, something flat and without pay-off. I'd rather just lay in bed for another fifteen minutes and sink into the shallow-oblivion of half sleep.

And I’m not suffering from some universal existential angst here. I’m not doubting that there’s any meaning to be had from life. What I’m doubting is that there’s any meaning left for me.

At the same time as I worry this, I also think: I’m being so clichéd, every other twenty-three year old with a touch of ambition feels as hopeless as I do. It will pass, or I'll get used to it, or I'll wake up tomorrow and bam everything will be okay.

Maybe that's worse, though. That everyone feels this way.

*

I’m living in a strange city. I don’t know which bars to go to, I don't know which cafes to go to - and when I do go somewhere, I'm alone - and shy. So I read a lot. I've been watching far too much of the HBO Original Series The Wire. And don’t get me wrong – I’ve met a lot of very nice people here. But there’s something missing in the day-to-day concourse of my life. My great friends – those people who know me well enough for me to be wholly open with them, who probably like me enough to read this blog on a semi-regular basis – they’re all far away from me. I hear their voices on the phone, I send them e-mails. But after a while, those long-distance calls make my present loneliness just seem a bit starker. I can remember a time when I knew everyone, when I could feel popular and successful, where I was a senior in a small college and I knew what to do.

So I feel caught adrift on something. Placeless.

And where do I go from here? My ambition leads me somewhere. But where? I know I want to write. But there’s a whole underground economy of wannabe writers, garnishing their egos with short stories and blog posts, who have just as much ambition and just as much talent as I do. I'd like to be able to sell some Alternative Weekly my squid facts for one-hundred dollars a pop. But the things I find interesting seem to bore other people. I feel foreign to a big bulk ot people. And there are plenty of people who have found themselves friendless in a big city. There are plenty of people who wake up and get scared that the next warm summer day they step out into they'll be twenty-four and not be allowed to have fun.

You’d hope that your dread, your angst, your deepest fears, weren’t so goddamned normal that they were terribly clichéd. I wish I could be feeling something horribly shocking and new. I want groundbreaking angst.

But at the same time as I dismiss this, it's there, and it's real, and it's hard to shake it. I wake up and don't have joy, only hunger. I work and what I do is desperate - like a person at the beach trying to scratch their name in the sand quickly before the next wave comes to wash it all away.

I want to run away to a new life. One where I can go into a cafe and everyone says hi and wants to talk about books. One where I can go read my short stories out loud at open mic nights. One where I can call my friends - and see them, in flesh, in real life - and talk with them in silly voices. And the hard part is that the life I imagine seems about as possible as me making friends with Mark Twain; which I want to do, by the way.

Sophistication / Alienation

(Image from unasthetic, found on digg.)

So, to get the basic outline of my mood, add up these two pieces of media: I've been reading George Saunders' new book, In Persuasion Nation, and listening to some Joanna Newsom.

And let's just illustrate the mood: I was walking through the supermarket last night, and all the products lined up looked like little soldiers, and I kept on thinking that there was something horrible wrong and empty about a supermarket at night. Maybe something horribly wrong when you were alone, friendless, and poor - like I was - trying to find solace in food, in consumption, in buying. There was a hint that the supermarket, or whatever grim force had organized it, was actually responsible for my feeling lonely. And thus I imagined a horrible conspiracy mustered against me and against every other sensitive person: to somehow rob their souls of this bright essential thing, to feed our loneliness and despair so that we would buy more, only because when we bought more, we needed to work more. And so work itself became this grim fuel for an engine grand and sinister. This vision! it came to me suddenly! as if the curtain hiding it from my sight was just ripped away! And America was no longer America anymore, but one huge strip mall, the roads clogged arteries leading to depression and loneliness, the houses no longer comfortable, but cages, our diseased heart beating only so we could lurch further into - into what? Some inexpressible doom. And me! How little I seemed next to it! And I have the pride and conceit to think that my little sadness can break it.

Now, the other side of this feeling, which may be particularly modern, is that at the same time as I was drawing this rather apocalyptic vision of capitalism I knew that I was just in a bad mood, that this discontent was somehow contingent and temporary. Which didn't make the feeling any better. It was like Don Quixote saw his windmills, wanted with all his heart to fight them, but also knew, knew with the better force of his reason, that they were windmills after all, and that he was a faker, for all his bravery.

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself. My discontent is actually built on some pretty solid ground, I think. It's obvious, frankly, that our society is sick. And the precise source of that sickness may be a mystery, but it is fair to say that our materialistic tendencies are exploited in the extreme, while the spiritual and artistic fruits of our lives are left to rot.

The problem a young sophisticate faces when he turns and faces his culture with disgust is this: Do you turn away from the world, just because it seems for a moment wrong? That world is filled with plenty of people, people who may need help, and turning away from them in favor of Joanna Newsom albums and masturbation just seems a little bit solipsistic. But on the other hand, isn't it just pure ego to think that I, a wet-liberal sophisticate, just because I have some refined taste and political pretensions, actually have a duty to change the world? That those other people need my help? Because they don't have as good taste as me.

Beneath that, I whine to myself. I want someone - preferably the girl I'm interested in in a romantic way - to come and fix me. But, sad for me and sad for every single male sophisticate from the Song of Songs to the Counting Crows - the girl has her own life. And then, the cycle continues: I cannot even feel this selfish need wholeheartedly, I know it will pass, I know it is selfish, I know it is fake.

This wider cycle continues on. A cycle of alienation, disgust, and separation. And yet what is one to do?

Now, normally I really like supermarkets. I find there to be such a joy in looking at the fields of broad bright color of the food, and to know that you can have it, eat it - have you ever stopped to think the sheer bounty that you can find at your local supermarket? Foods of every sort, chocolate, ice creams, pizzas, peaches anything you want! Normally I can control myself from feeling alienated. I can look at everything pretty judiciously and gently. But what makes the floodgates of my ego fall down, and lead to this - to mopey sadness? To this mixture of pride and alienation? To this tangle of despair and ego? Because whatever it is, I think that more of us feel this confused feeling - only it's hard to name, hard to express.

And so this is how we register our discontent. This is how we rebel. The rebellion of an ingrown toenail.