My relationship with my rabbit – Rodger, who had a brother named Dodger – was never the same after Watership Down.
At the age of six, I was more accustomed to the playful, shallow dangers of Disney films and Pingu’s misadventures in watering holes. Never could I have anticipated this dystopian vision of rabbit society, with its crimson-eyed bunnies and tales of inexplicable loss, nor the feelings that would be stirred by the incongruously soft yet brutally melancholic soundtrack, Bright Eyes, and its Sunday-afternoon melody.
For weeks after, my dreams turned to gnashing teeth, fluffy cadavers pancaked to tarmac and ruby eyes set in darkness. I discovered fear. And I didn’t know it back then, but I discovered the quavering shadow that falls in fear’s wake – anxiety.
How fear becomes anxiety
If you didn’t have your childhood torn asunder by Watership Down, it’s likely fear was similarly discovered in film, TV or literature – like Stephen King’s It, which ruined clowns forever.
When we’re young, our fears have a face, centred upon a particular symbol, thing or person, and anchored in experience or memory. But as we get older, fears grow more abstract, and the thing we’re afraid of is replaced by no-thing. This is the source of anxiety. We cannot run and we cannot stay, so we’re suspended in unease, a malaise tirelessly spun by shadows and unknowable futures. In other words, fear transitions from a foreground to a background process.
But I’m not afraid
If you’re thinking this has no bearing on me – that fear is the converse of bravery, and I am brave – then consider fear not just as a fight-or-flight response to an event, but the ebb of action into inaction. There are no wolves left; in all but death, we’re the predator.
Fear is the chasm between two seemingly innocuous choices: the myriad of ‘what ifs’ and ‘shoulds’ superimposed onto our decisions, big and small. This is commonly known as decision paralysis. Any moment can be one of fear, and its solution lies beyond rationalisations of courage or coward, real or imaginary. If there’s anxiety, there’s fear. Anxiety is a sustained fight-or-flight response to innumerable stimuli, borne simultaneously from the past, present and future – though, for many, it’s anchored by a single experience.
Aren’t we the lucky ones?
We’re no less entitled to our fears and anxieties than those living in war-torn countries. Few of us face physical threats. Our lives may be more materialistically comfortable, but our dangers and troubles are inverted: the storm has moved indoors, sealed within.
We, the slovenly, comfortable office workers that risk only paper cuts and coffee-cup mishaps, are at a disadvantage. Our fear isn’t preceded by a howl, the maniacal laughter of a clown or the grated churning of a chainsaw; it’s sparked by invisible forces that exist on the periphery of form, in our minds, but which are no less real.
There are few who will not experience anxiety on a weekly, if not daily – if not hourly – basis. Perhaps it’s only in the morning, contained in momentary hesitations, or triggered by a deadline or a meeting, by criticism or by praise, or inexplicably, with no perceptible reason.
In each case, there’s nothing to run from. We’re compelled by our routines and the societal encouragement to ‘get on with it’, otherwise known as the stiff-upper-lip mentality. And this state – like clambering from phantasms in a sealed cage – locks us into cyclical patterns of anxiety.
I feel anxious at work
Many of us feel anxious at work. Work is a labyrinth of intangible dangers, nestled behind suits and smiles and fun-coloured furniture. There are few places stress is more acutely felt, largely due to the seminal role work plays in our lives. In our current exhibitionist society, in which we view ourselves not in isolation but across a collated spectrum of achievements and incomes, our career is how we determine our value.
We’re drip-fed self-worth by work, which, as with any dependency, means we fear to lose it. Work is what we are; the impetus of fear is self-preservation. The wolves are the believed outcomes of poor performance, miscommunications and, even, new opportunities. So ingrained are we in this work-life symbiosis that the loss of a job, income or reputation is tantamount to ill-health or severe loss. Consciously we may not recognise it, yet our subconscious and biological triggers are the same. We’re in peril, or believe ourselves to be, but cannot see the edge.
I also don’t like change
Yeah – I get that. Change, even positive change, is a leap into the unknown – a careen down a dim-lit esplanade, exposed and vulnerable. We cannot predict every variable, and so our initial instinct wavers and we default to inaction. We stay at jobs we do not enjoy and maintain relationships, work and otherwise, that do not help us. We’re sheltered by familiarity (yet this is seldom recognised, and usually reframed as an organic wish for comfort and stability).
There is no greater inhibitor of success than fear – which is ironic, as success-based obsession stirs fear. Success must be met with little resistance, unburdened by the lofty expectations of dramatised entrepreneurialism (fetishised by the millennial narrative). Fear is resistance – and anxiety is a state of resistance where each door, even those opened to us earnestly and with good intent, are dressed in danger signs and prophesies of untimely ends.
The more we become our work identities, the more easily anxiety finds us. We become locked into a hamster-wheel pursuit, supposing the next pay rise or promotion will be our point of security and contentment. Rather than placating anxiety, success adds to it – that is, until the elastic band snaps and we realise that every time we reach a goal, the tree goes taller and sprouts new branches.
Anxiety is always concerned with tomorrow, but tomorrow never becomes today.
How to not feel anxious at work
Like many mental ensnares, anxiety's solution isn't simple. To think about thinking is thought, and to worry about worry creates worry. Simple doesn't mean easy, and that we should put on a front in public spaces – our identities formed of borrowed steel, grafted over our fears and insecurities like armour – is an absurd and toxic attitude perpetuated by those who are no less susceptible to anxiety, but fear its implication. It’s weakness to be afraid of weakness, and unnatural to be resistant to what is essentially human.
Humans have always feared: apprehension and anxiety are as natural to us as love. The only difference between then and now is our struggle to know what we’re afraid of or about, a paradoxical state in which the lack of physical threat has allowed the danger to seep into invisible spaces. We’ve not fighting for survival; we’re fighting for symbols and statuses, wealth, acclaim and envy, that are broadly outlined by Hollywood illustrations but their whereabouts unknown. That’s where we lose ourselves – in stories.
Wrapped in fixations of what is not, we become more unsure, insecure and lost. It is natural to feel anxiety, but not perpetually so; every emotion requires a release valve, a way to finalise, be confronted and settle. As long as we’re suspended in fiction’s web, we will not be able to confront what is. Today has neither resistance nor pretensions. It is what it is, and hopes for nothing more than what is. Presence is the release.
The opening line of Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes asks: is it a kind of dream? When I consider my life with anxiety, it makes sense that this wistful, lugubrious melody chimed with me. Not just because I was afraid of murderous rabbits, twisted visions of my own beloved pet, but because it formed a prelude to something I’d felt awaken in my being, that as I grew older was more my shadow than my shadow and, as I grew wiser, saw etched into the eyes of others. It’s a mantra to the eerie dread of what is and what isn’t, the conflict between where we are today and where we could be tomorrow. It’s a fog upon the horizon; a strange glow in the sky. Unease. Malaise. Disquiet. Everything other than today is a dream, veiled in impenetrable mists, as real (or not) as anything ever dreamt up and written into fiction.