“There’s no way I can speak in class because I have social anxiety,” she told me. Whether the anxiety was at bay when speaking to me was a question I didn’t—couldn’t—ask.
Not like this was an anomalous case. Nobody even wants to show up anymore. Nobody wants to be seen. So my Zoom classes are packed. But nobody wants to be seen on Zoom, so their cameras are off. Even with their cameras off, they don’t want to speak. Anxiety is the most common reason I get.
Anxiety is not exactly an object. But it can be an object of consciousness. It can be trapped in the body. And it can change your life.
Anxiety, Kierkegaard tells us in The Concept of Anxiety, is about the possibility of possibility. It’s about imagining all the things that aren’t happening but could be happening or should be happening or may be happening and regarding which you are somehow unaware or too aware and are imaginatively catastrophizing in just the right way.
Anxiety is about limited perspective, and about the fact that, as Sartre observed, we are condemned to be free. No freedom, no anxiety. Some days that tradeoff looks pretty good. Only it isn’t actually a possibility. So it’s not really about choices, per se. It’s about having to choose at all.
Even evading your anxiety is a choice. And evasion itself can provoke anxiety.
Anxiety isn’t like fear, since fear is about something specific: that test you’re going to flunk or that meeting with your boss. Anxiety is amorphous and creeps up the back of your neck like a cold wind in winter. It’s like an illness you can’t shake, or chronic knee pain you’ve been dealing with since you hit double digits in the fifth grade.
Maybe anxiety is related to imposter syndrome: others thinking certain things are the case when you think they’re not, or you thinking they are when others think they’re not. But you can’t see things from their perspective, so you feel it in your body. Anxiety. No wonder nobody shows up anymore.
Maybe anxiety is about control and knowing you can never have it.
The nothingness of anxiety has its own gravity, its own palpable mass. You can feel it in your chest. An insufferable pressure that can’t be brushed aside with alcohol or drugs. At least not without a significant reduction in conscious awareness.
Sometimes the weight of anxiety can be the heaviest thing in the world.
Kierkegaard imagines that before the Fall, Adam and Eve lived as if in a dream. But after guilt entered the world, there was anxiety. Anxiety is what it is precisely because it has no object. It’s not guilt, but that doesn’t mean those with anxiety don’t somehow feel guilty. The dream is over.
“Turning my camera on causes me anxiety,” I was told earlier this week. “It’s too stressful.” It’s about the possibility of possibility, yes it is. And another word for that is life.
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Illustrated by Lara Schaberg
