Writing as therapy: the anxiety sponge
by Rebecca Wait
Author Rebecca Wait shares her experience of anxiety.
In her book The View on the Way Down, Rebecca Wait tells the incredibly moving story of a family deeply affected by depression, which she herself suffered from in her teens. Here, she talks about her experience of anxiety and how writing both helps her escape it and creates a few problems of its own.
I watch as a brief, pained expression passes across my boyfriend's face. 'Please,' he says, 'can't you just be normal?'
I've been trying to explain to him my anxieties about plagiarism – the chance that I might have read something years ago, internalized it, then unconsciously passed it off later as my own. I expand, as I have often before, upon the potential consequences of this: I will be sued, my books will be pulped, they'll write about me in the Telegraph, I'll be publicly disgraced. ('You can't be publicly disgraced,' a friend once pointed out, 'if you're not actually famous.' An uncharitable comment.)
My boyfriend describes it like this, the way I interact with the world: I have a vast, nebulous mass of free-floating anxiety in my head. It's constantly searching, parasitically, for the next non-issue to latch onto. This is a good way of putting it. Once it's found its target, the anxiety sponge, all perspective vanishes, and I am left with the repetitive, smothering cycle of my own worry.
I wrote my first novel about my teenage experience of depression, and feel strongly that it's an illness that needs to be talked about. Depression is nasty. It kills people. It nearly killed me. However, I am less used to discussing depression's wily companion, anxiety, which has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. People tell me to be normal, but this is normal for me. The trouble is, anxiety doesn't always sound like a serious problem. ('Really?' I imagine people are thinking. 'You feel worried? We all feel worried.') But at its worst – and mine is far from the worst – it is crippling. It can stop you leaving the house. It can stop you doing your job. It makes you feel trapped and terrified and hopeless.
Writing brings with it fertile new hunting-ground for my free-floating anxiety cloud. But all the same, it helps. The act of writing – when it's going well – has an extraordinary way of making the world recede for a few hours. It allows you to shut down that part of your mind that has got stuck on a single, horrible track, or at least to turn away from it for a while. Writing can be a way of imposing order on a world that is starting to look frayed at the edges.
The View on the Way Down
Emma used to have two brothers, but five years ago Kit died and on the day of his funeral Jamie left home and never came back. Their parents never talk about what happened. But now Emma is older she is beginning to ask questions - and she's never given up hope that she will see Jamie again . . .
Told with honesty and warmth, The View on the Way Down is the story of a devastating act of brotherly love that will open your eyes even as it breaks your heart.
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