how to write about anxiety in 2025
challenge level: impossible
Imagine you are a writer.
You have spent your entire life filling up notebooks. Your desktop is a mausoleum of ideas that have gone nowhere (only occasionally do ideas rise from the dead and find a place out in the world). You have called yourself a poet; a nonfiction writer; a fiction writer.
You don’t typically enjoy writing using second-person narration (“you”). You stick to first-person (“I”) or third-person narration (he/she/they). Second-person narration is hard to do well, and the “you” keeps the audience at a distance. This is difficult to sustain over the course of a longer piece of work.
You have earned two degrees in writing. You have a book proposal and manuscript. You have a literary agent. You teach writing to college students.
You are clinically diagnosed with anxiety, and when you write about that, you are “a writer who concerns herself with anxiety.” Your life revolves around writing, and for several years, revolves around writing specifically about anxiety.
You even have a Substack where you write about anxiety. You do so with a modest audience and occasionally, your work gets a mention someplace else.
In order to be someone who writes about anxiety, you steep yourself in it from every angle. You spend hours writing, rewriting, drafting, editing your work. Research is long and ever-lasting; you read about the history of psychology, psychiatry, and medicine; you read about Freud; you read about the “hysteria” diagnosis over time; you study the etymology of psychological terms; you consume social science, hard science, memoir, confessionals, poetry, films, documentaries, podcasts, YouTube videos, TikToks, etc trying to find something novel you can add to the conversation.
Because there is, indeed, a conversation happening! COVID-19 and Trump really brought that to the forefront of the zeitgeist! It is all around you! You are anxious and not alone in that anxiety! Surely you have something more to contribute! Surely this is the writing you were meant to do! Surely you are about to “make it” as a writer, that precious undefined ideal that definitely exists somewhere, anywhere!
But then November 2024 happens. Trump is elected again.
You tell yourself it’s ok to be in survival mode for a bit. You have a lot of people in your life to care for, yourself included. You have holiday plans and gifts to buy and a zillion distractions to take solace in.
Then the Cheeto-in-Chief is back for real. In the span of six months, the country and the future you hoped for begin to crumble.
You work for a university that prides itself on diversity and inclusion, with a large population of international students and faculty. The university specializes in STEM research, including climate change. Some of your students’ visas were revoked mid-semester, and then re-instated, but may be revoked once again on short notice.
Your husband runs a small business. The only manufacturers his industry utilizes are all overseas.
The queer community you love so deeply is under attack. You are fearful for your friends and your students. You are fearful for yourself.
Your friends who work for government agencies are abruptly let go. Then, your friends who work for organizations that work with government agencies are let go. After that, your friends who rely on government funding and grants for their jobs, or their art, or their research, have to pivot or stop their work entirely.
Every day, new footage and photos are released from Gaza. Every day, your heart breaks to see it. Everyday you are told that you are not doing enough for Palestinians (which is true). You are also told that you are betraying your own people, the Jewish people, for condemning the atrocities and war crimes Israel is responsible for (this you know is untrue). You struggle with knowing what to say or do, and you are ashamed of your own flailing when Palestinian activists are speaking truth to power without hesitation.
In Georgia, a woman is kept alive to act as an incubator for a baby. You and your husband decide that states like Georgia are no longer safe to even visit because their local governments care more about your potential fertility than your actual body.
The money you and your husband have invested in the stock market is suddenly diminished. Your parents, who have diligently saved for retirement, watch a chunk of their hard work evaporate. Everyone tells you have time and the market will bounce back and it will all be ok because it has to be. You struggle to take comfort in that when you study the stark angles of the stock market graphs as this cursed year rolls along.
As you write this Substack draft, you receive a push notification that Israel has allegedly bombed Iran’s state television station in the middle of a live news broadcast. You debate whether you want to include this, and potentially date your piece of writing, if that will somehow invalidate your anxiety. You think about the people who went to work as usual this morning and kissed their families good-bye for the very last time. You think about those families, who might have been watching the live broadcast when it happened.
As you edit this Substack draft, you are awaiting a push notification whether the US will officially enter Israel’s war against Iran. You want to curl up under a blanket and cry.
You are told that now more than ever people need to read about anxiety. That it is more relevant than ever. That folks want to read about anxiety now. It is so, so needed. They will buy a book on anxiety! They will sign up for your Substack!
You don’t tell them the truth. Your book proposal is officially out-of-date and has been for a while. More importantly, it is DOA, and has been pronounced so by more than one editor. Besides, the publishing industry isn’t interested in small, debut authors unless they have massive social media platforms. You don’t have a big social media platform; you deleted Twitter/X because that shit has been getting creepier, more anti-Semitic, more misogynistic.
You smile and nod when folks say these things. You know they believe in you and want to be kind. But inwardly you know the truth: you are exhausted.
You have spent years learning and writing and rewriting and reading and re-learning and re-examining and drafting and actively listening and crying and reading some more and writing and learning and pitching and submitting and rewriting.
Now, the work you thought would make your writing career reminds you of a piece of gum you’ve chewed so long it has turned tasteless and tough.
The world and future are crumbling around you. The stakes are so high. And the only metaphor you can think of is…gross old chewing gum.
Still, you draft Substack posts, but you hate them all. You delete them. Writing anything at all feels heavy, laborious, impossible. You write short stories, and rewrite them, then scrap them all together. A new cemetery pops up: pitch emails to online publication editors that never leave your draft folder. Hell, you even fall behind on replying to text messages from friends. You feel like a fraud, asking your students to pump out writing assignments when you yourself can barely write a paragraph without checking the New York Times front page for updates on how the world has shattered yet again over the past hour.
Friends ask you why you aren’t posting to your Substack anymore. They offer ideas you’ve mentioned in conversation that could be the start of a Substack post.
But here is the thing. You don’t know what to say, and when you figure out what it is you do want to say, it is already too late. Things are moving so fast. And some ideas are dangerous to share. Dangerous because Scary Daddy Government is watching, or dangerous because they could implicate folks in your life who are vulnerable, or dangerous because the smallest, more sensitive parts of yourself would be on display.
You wish fervently that you lived in more precedented times, despite the contrarians who love to yell at you: There’s never been a safe and stable time in history! We always think we’re at the end of history! In the words of Beckett: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
You don’t typically enjoy second-person narration. It is hard to do well, and the “you” keeps the audience at a distance, which is difficult to sustain in an engaging manner.
But sometimes, you have to try something different. You have to say something, anything. The chewing gum has been in your mouth too long. You could keep chewing it until it dissolves into nothingness entirely; or add another stick of gum for a rush of flavor, avoiding the problem of tasteless candy a little while longer; or you can take it out of your mouth and forget the whole thing; or blow a gigantic bubble that explodes into little sticky pieces all over your face.
Ultimately, you have to try something. Even if it leaves a stale taste in your mouth, or pops loudly, or creates a gnarly wad stuck to the bottom of your foot. What you need is a place to start, however imperfect.
At some point, you have to put work into the world. You have to say you tried yet again. You have to pivot and pivot and pivot again. You have to spit out the thing that is making your teeth stick together in the hopes that one day, you’ll know what the truth you want to share tastes like.
I hear you. I couldn’t write/publish anything for almost a year. Everything is just so overwhelming I agree, and I’m not even in the US. Take good care and solidarity wishes!