The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek once said that anxiety is the only emotion that does not deceive. Anxiety, for another philosopher, Martin Heidegger, brings the human being face to face with the slow yet relentless drifting of everything into nothingness, including one’s own existence. Soren Kierkegaard, the thinker most famous for his thoughts on this matter, had defined anxiety as the dizziness of freedom in the face of boundless possibilities of existence. All three definitions make sense to me. Anxiety not only reveals existence from a safe distance as a concept but sensibly makes us feel its indubitably charged reality along with its ever-shifting polarities: Its wonder and its terror, its providence and its malice, its brimming beauty, and its grotesque absurdity. Anxiety is real, and it makes the real feel all too real, giving it a dark density that weighs upon one’s heart—similar perhaps to how a star might feel just before it implodes into a black hole. Anxiety, to wit, is the world made flesh.
In my relatively long stint as a teacher, I have encountered numerous students with anxiety disorders. They reveal this to me sometimes before oral exams or in the middle of the school year when they feel that they are not performing as well as they can in class. Their narratives presented me with an image in my head: A person who literally has a monkey on her back she just can’t shrug off—just annoyingly weighing her down, getting in the way of her plans, disturbing moments solitude, and sowing fear in prospects of solicitude. I sense their palpable frustration when they try to explain to me what it feels like to have a panic attack in the middle of an exam, while in the MRT during rush hour, while being with friends in a party, or even while sitting alone on a bench along SEC walk. Their stories sound like harrowing accounts of trauma victims, terrified to recount their experiences, afraid that re-telling it would only make it happen again. Having an anxiety disorder sounds like being in a perpetual boxing match with an invisible opponent, unexpectedly jabbing you in the face and throwing a left hook to your ribs just when you feel that the match might finally be over. It is a crippling sense of paranoia not just for the future but in every immediate present. It is truly like fighting an indefatigably mischievous monkey that has no other joy but to annoyingly ruin your plans.
Hence, I am made to ask, where might this monkey come from? Does it come from one’s imagination? Is it a phantom produced by a chemical imbalance in one’s brain? Is it inherited from a former bearer in one’s family? Does one unwittingly get it during teenage years, perhaps during a fight with a parent or an experience of losing one’s way in a shady eskinita littered with tambays somewhere in Quiapo? Perhaps, more importantly, sufferers of this condition ask why the monkey chose them and not others. Some, on the brink of despair, might even silently wish they had a worse physical ailment: Maybe lose an eye, or a kidney, than to be afflicted with such an unfair and overbearing condition that nobody else seems to understand as much as those who are suffering from it. It seems like no matter how many times one Googles it in order to know how to treat it, it only grows more powerful with every keyword search and mindfulness website inquiry. It seems like having an anti-panic attack pill ready in one’s pocket only makes its presence loom larger during the day. Anticipating it makes it real, yet not minding it gives one a sense that it is merely biding its time before it strikes with a knockout blow—like an earthquake but with fault lines embedded not on the crust but in the very core of one’s being. It truly seems incorrigible.
The annoyance obviously comes from the desire to cure oneself of it, to rid oneself of the monkey that might not be there at all. As with anything one has that one does not wish to have, one wants to throw it away, leave it behind, sweep it under the rug, or burn it in a trash bin with a proverbial match and lighter fluid. Most especially in cases where one feels that the affliction is thoroughly undeserved, similar to Job’s fate, one feels that such a great injustice towards one’s being must have a remedy somewhere—fate cannot be this cruel.
While there are the Escitaloprams and the Alprazolams that are often prescribed to allay one’s symptoms, most people will tell you that anxiety (for instance, GAD or generalized anxiety disorder) does not simply go away. As long as the main cause is not completely treated, one is bound to combat merely its indicators and temporarily hold that monkey in a zoo until it finds a way to escape and find its way back on to one’s back like a heavily breathing Herschel full of overdue library books on anxiety. That is why most psychiatrists recommend regular visits just to make sure that the keys to the lock are kept at a safe distance from the panicky primate. “Talking helps” is what they usually say. Talking about anxiety with a professional can help one untangle the knots of fear and uncertainty that makes it difficult for the mind to function in an optimal level. Talking externalizes the threat, giving it a face, a definition, and therefore, limits. Water in the sea and sea water in a bucket might essentially be the same, but the bucket provides one with at least the illusion of its finitude, making the sea seem less monstrous.
Speaking to someone about one’s anxiety can supposedly disenchant it, make it lose power over one’s life, because more often than not, the things that truly pester and fester in our daily lives come from the power we grant to our thoughts—a power that is oftentimes disproportionate to their counterparts in reality. Anxiety reveals the power of our thoughts over our reality. Perception, as some philosophers claim, is reality. What populates our mind also populates our world. When one, for instance, is in love with a person enough to make that person the sun of one’s mind’s solar system, every person one sees in the cafeteria starts to look like that person, or if not, uglier or less attractive than her. Analogously, anxiety, this object-less fear of what is not yet, populates the mind with overwhelming possibilities, both good and bad, imploding this very difference until one is simply frozen into inaction and surrender. It is precisely this dizziness of freedom that Kierkegaard spoke of that truly gets in the way of the life one wishes to live. Anxiety is the affliction of freedom.
Anxiety is a malheur, an affliction that bends and tries to break the will. The Book of Job 14: 1-2 says, “We are all born weak and helpless. All lead the same, short troubled life. We grow and wither as quickly as flowers; we disappear like shadows.” Job, being a dedicated servant of God, is puzzled by his affliction and is left blind, alone in an opaque darkness that no light can seem to illuminate. Yet, it is precisely within the ambit of his absurd suffering that he begins to become aware of the radical uniqueness of the human condition—that for all our power and virtue, we are never safe from the ever-looming possibility of affliction. This tragic insight makes room for grace, where one begins to open oneself to the possibility of salvation from the very Other that may have been the source of one’s affliction. Unless the self becomes conscious of its radical fragility and subjection to blind necessity, it will continue to think that it is the center of the universe, and it will never realize the unconditional necessity of grace. As the mystic philosopher Simone Weil says in Gateway to God:
“Our flesh is fragile; it can be pierced or torn or crushed, or one of its internal mechanisms can be permanently deranged, by any piece of matter in motion. Our soul is vulnerable, being subject to fits of depression without cause and pitifully dependent upon all sorts of objects, inanimate and animate, which are themselves fragile and capricious. Our social personality, upon which our sense of existence almost depends, is always and entirely exposed to every hazard. These three parts of us are linked with the very center of our being in such a way that it bleeds for any wound of the slightest consequence which they suffer.” (88)
It is only upon the realization of one’s fragility that radical humility is possible. And I think that it is this radical humility that truly opens the possibility of authentic freedom. The affliction of anxiety de-centers the ego, allowing it to experience the obscene helplessness that is in fact the very essence of our humanity. From the larger perspective of eternity and grace, ours is a life that is nourished and also extinguished by forces beyond our control. To ask the question, “Why me of all people?” sums up the experience of being afflicted by a psychological and metaphysical condition such as anxiety. It allows one to share in Christ’s anguish on the cross, when he shouted to his Father, “Why have you forsaken me!?”
Affliction turns human beings into things, as Weil says, reducing them to matter, through which the indifference of the universe is most felt. The anxiety of affliction is precisely heard in the silence of God and the universe to one’s cries. Affliction is ridiculously absurd; for no reasons, whether imagined or scientifically granted, can ever truly explain its existence in one’s life. When one’s very freedom is negated by inexplicable circumstances—very much like the way anxiety arrests the otherwise regularity and controllability of one’s movements—one is exposed to the possibility of grappling with the very reality of one’s existence, its contingency, its triviality, its radical mystery. Ultimately, the affliction of anxiety grants ultimate value in one’s choice to proceed, to continue, to live, despite one’s misgivings towards a silent and uncaring universe.
If not for affliction we would only be able to find existence good when it conforms to the interests of the ego. To find it good, despite affliction, is truly the essence of a gratuitous freedom. When one is able to consent to affliction, one does not give up. Quite the opposite, in my view, when one is able to accept the affliction of anxiety, one genuinely chooses to love existence precisely in its radical unloveability. If we continue with using divine analogies, freedom despite the presence of the affliction of anxiety is to courageously and graciously carry one’s cross no matter how much one thinks this burden may be undeserved.
As someone personally familiar with the affliction of anxiety, I can attest to the radical necessity of consent with respect to this condition. After all is said and done, after all the doctors are consulted and the medicines are taken, one task remains to be undertaken every single day: To choose to open oneself not just to the possibility of healing, but perhaps more importantly, to the impossibility of being healed. It is this task that truly makes one appreciate the gift of grace and reveals to oneself the insurmountable contingency and finitude of human effort and will. Ironically it is in being beset by absurd fear, that one is afforded the choice to be courageous.
Marc Oliver D. Pasco, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Philosophy Department.Editor’s note: A shorter version of this column was published in The GUIDON’s November-December issue for AY 2019-2020.
