Anxiety as a gift of insight

it’s always ephemeral

Know that you are not alone,
And that this darkness has purpose;
Gradually it will school your eyes,
To find the one gift your life requires
Hidden within this night-corner.

—John O’Donohue

Anxiety buzzes in the background, taking space and distracting attention. I can remember times of celebration or joy that drained me because the buzzing occupied enough of my attention to make the rest feel draining. It was in the quiet of a bookstore that I had my first panic attack in my 20s, the peaking of this noise.

While I have not had a panic attack in over a decade, I remember it vividly. I remember struggling to deploy the techniques I’d learned from a therapist (drink a glass of water and imagine the water washing away the worry) or from a book (recite a mantra and carry on until you feel calibrated again).

What worked best for me was writing.

“Those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.” —Mark Rothko

My creative brain was at work hard when anxious, and when I channeled it toward imagining something else—another world or another personal reality—it shifted attention. But ultimately, creativity isn’t about eliminating pain. It’s about exploring it.

Anxiety itself showed up in characters and themes. Not in a distracting way, but in a way that felt like a study.

I brng this up because I haven’t felt as much anxiety in years as I have in 2026, and while I am not saying this was particularly fun, I can say that it is rich material to mine. Because it’s human and its raw. Anxiety, like most pains and distractions, offers an invitation to explore what we are repressing or not paying attention to.

In the early 2000s, I was trying to move forward without addressing pains and abuses. Now, I was trying to barrel ahead with my work without acknowledging the grief of aging and pains and boundary setting that I was struggling to implement.

“Each time I would do a performance, I would use it as a tool to actually deal with my emotions, to stage my feelings, and to go through the things I was afraid of.” —Marina Abramović

Art, writing, music and dance alike are made radiant by the human qualities that feed them. This includes the anxieties and pains. We all know this. We all want to watch or read or sit with an idea founded on a human story that makes us feel. But we so often forget.

Emotions are the fundamental building blocks of any art that is offering something. If you find yourself consumed by the details or are taking things too seriously or overthinking, remember to explore.

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” —Anaïs Nin

Photo by Lyndse Ballew

That’s all I have to say today.

Prompt: Explore the anxieties that surface in your life through the lens of your project. Anxietys can vary from actual panic to irritation during a commute to a need to be perfect to an inability to face a particular conversation that is looming over you. Be honest. Be raw. See what happens.

An offering:

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Notes: Check out Radicals. Order to your library. Buy for friends. Buy for family.