“When you’re really focussed on your goal, the anxiety will fall away.”
“Right..” I replied blandly as my 30 minute phone session with a Tony Robbins performance coach drew to an end.
I thanked the coach, an affable Dutch gentleman who I’d got in contact with in an effort to improve my scattergun “get published’ strategy and we agreed to speak again over the next week.
Just fall away? I thought. My anxiety? That’s easy for you to say.
But what if he was right? What if this mental malaise was just so much stagnant energy and untrained focus turning in on itself. A phantom made flesh through my own believing in its destructive power?
When I first took sick leave, depression wasn’t really a feature of my days. As time has passed, however, it’s come to be a staple of my daily experience. For a while I comforted myself with the notion that these were just layers getting stripped away, revealing another foe to be vanquished. Six months down the line though, I feel like I’ve got more layers than a Spanish onion and, like the snake that consumes its own tail, I’ve come to wonder whether all this analysis and inquiry into the cause of my anxiety and panic attacks has begun to devour all of my energy, become a project in itself. And one that has eclipsed the very purpose of this blog – to haul my sorry, stinking ass to my beloved finca.
Has the researching and trialling of different diets, bodywork modalities, exercise regimes, meditation protocols and mind-body methodologies to overcome my woes become an all-consuming end in itself? By taking my eye of the prize (writing and getting published), have I become mistakenly focused on Project Depression, investing all my resources in unravelling the Gordian knot of my misery? Does the problem only have as much energy as you invest in it? If there’s nothing wrong, then isn’t it true that nothing will appear to work?
We’d do well to ask ourselves this question.
Sometimes I look at my daily roll-call of practices; the 5am wake-ups, daily meditation, yogic breathing, journalling, gratitude practice, inner-child reflections, cold showers, vagus-nerve toning, time in nature, yoga practice, physical exercise, avoiding of alcohol/nicotine/caffeine/the Guardian and I think, really??? Should it be this hard just to get back to ordinary, common unhappiness that Freud described as the end point of psychoanalysis. Or is this all just so much feeding of the beast?
In his turbo-charged treatise on the creative life The War of Art, author and provocateur, Steven Pressfield singles out Resistance as the greatest obstacle to creation. Resistance wears many hats and is wily and implacable. Its raison d’etre is simply to destroy you and it enlists every argument, from the mild (you seem a little tired, today. Why not skip your word count?), to the ghastly (you WILL DIE if you try to write even a single line of this novel!).
You know that depression you’re feeling, Steven Pressfield raps towards the end of the book.
It might well indeed be depression.
(I know what’s coming)
But it could just be resistance, too.
Right.
Just saying…
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