Hi, Anxiety: Welcome to Worried Well
It's a blog. It's a business card. It's a loving homage to one of the most debilitating parts of the human experience.
So what are we doing here exactly? I'm not entirely sure just yet. For now I'm calling it Worried Well, reclaiming, in a way, a somewhat withering term for therapy clients whose concerns, while valid and important to them, may appear less urgent than those of other clients. But the "well" is a descriptor here as well as a noun—inviting an exploration into the idea that worrying might in some sense be a skill in itself that can be developed, a latent talent that can be harnessed for good.
This will be a place for me to write, specifically about psychotherapy and my very much still-burgeoning understanding of it. I've been practicing as an associate marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles for just over a year and a half after getting my master's in clinical psychology; whatever musings or regurgitations appear here come from a place of figuring it out myself in real time, not from one anywhere near expertise. I miss being in school, I miss the people I went to school with; I've been trying to fill that void by reading and learning on my own, without the part where there's a community and a faculty to tell me what I'm getting wrong.
More specifically, this writing, at least at the outset, will largely be about anxiety. (Write what you know.) Not about treatment or interventions or anything that would help anyone in practical terms, but maybe more like...what does the word even mean during a moment like this? I've been thinking and reading a lot about the historical context of ideas like anxiety and self-esteem that we might take for granted as having fixed definitions, but are in fact constructs, products of their time.
I guess this subject matter is personal insofar as I'm still trying to make sense of how my own relationship with anxiety has evolved from lifelong irritant and obstacle to something else, something closer to an engine. This reappraisal also feels tied to the current shitty moment: There is nothing like non-hypothetical catastrophe to put all the made-up ones in sharp relief.
Finally, I think this will be more than a little about how anxiety is reflected in culture and how that shapes how we process the feeling in our daily lives. Experiencing anxiety is not fun; watching someone else experience anxiety is the bedrock of comedy. There's something to this that I've been trying to get my head around most of my life, how something so frustrating and paralyzing and destructive can also just be kind of charming. The world as we knew it is being dismantled by men with no shortage of confidence, maybe we owe crippling self-doubt an apology.
The image gracing the landing page of this site is Albert Brooks from 1981's feature-length anxiety attack Modern Romance, a piece of art that has probably been as influential to me as anything I can think of. But it's a line Brooks says in a movie he did not write or direct, 1987's Broadcast News, that feels apt as part of a mission statement: "Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive?"
I think in some way this endeavor is an exploration of the idea that maybe we are in that world now. And it's not great. But it's a little bit good.
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