The sanity thief
Originally posted: February 18, 2020
2019 got off to a rocky start. For reasons I still can’t fully articulate, I fell into an anxiety spiral in the first half of the year. It felt like one of those Escher paintings where you’re climbing stairs to nowhere that never end.
It began during a quiet period, when I was home and not travelling, not even really doing much book promotion, supposedly stress-free. That’s when the anxiety crept up. All stealthy like. Like a bank robber. To steal my sanity. And for a long time I didn’t realize it was even anxiety. Or rather, I knew I was anxious but also, I thought I was dying. Because these are the wholly rational thoughts anxiety produces. You. Are. Dying. Now.
Helpfully, my best friend pointed out that mortality is the human condition. We’re all dying, Shar, she said, then grinned at her own cleverness because she’s perverse like that. We were having cocktails at Sassafraz after one of my events and I told her I was putting those words into my next book as revenge.
Sometime in the spring, I realized I wasn’t actually dying. Or at least, not right this second and not any faster than any other mostly healthy person my age who occasionally eats kale and zones out in spin class. There was nothing much wrong with my body except a screw had come loose in my head. So then I cast about for the cause. Objectively and subjectively, life was grand. What can be wrong when all your professional pipe dreams have come true? What can be wrong when you have a nice life with people you love in a safe country with free healthcare? What is there to be anxious about?
I’m having a mid-life crisis, I group texted my friends. It’s fucking tedious. Six months and I’m getting it out of my system.
Turns out, I’m the person who gives her midlife crisis a deadline. I’m also the person who does her homework. I took up meditation (Calm is a really excellent app by the way). I began each morning by thinking of three nice things from the day before. I read a bunch of research articles about anxiety and had a long, long chat with a friend who is a cognitive psychologist. I went to one deeply unhelpful and condescending therapy session. I took all my bad feelings and channelled it into my work. I wasn’t totally sure any of these things were getting me closer to a solution. I still felt like an anxious thrumming ball of awful.
And then, one day in September, when I was coming to grips with things and feeling genuinely better, I was listening to Rebecca Traister talking about her book “Good and Mad,” how its unexpected success had lengthened her book tour and how stressful that was and how the fall out was intense, irrational, anxiety. Hello. What’s that? Anxiety caused by book publication? DING DING DING. And yes, let me just acknowledge this is peak first world/ fortunate author problems.
Tom, my doctor, some other people probably, had suggested that perhaps it was publication and publicity and the whole whirlwind of the previous year that was to blame but until I heard another author mirror back my experiences, it was impossible to believe a good thing could cause bad feelings. As Daniel Lavery likes to say, life is a rich tapestry.
This week I was listening to John Green, whose fourth novel, The Fault in Our Stars, went super nova in 2012, talk about his own success and its resulting fall out. His issues, like his success, are so much more intense than mine ever were, but much of what he said, about the bad that comes married to the good, was familiar.
All this to say, if you are an author on year two of an even mildly successful book, feeling crappy for no good reason, it’s not a mid-life crisis. It’s not a catastrophic illness. It’s success. This is what it feels like.
And also! Importantly! It will pass.
