Writing for The Financial Times, Katie Roiphe, a journalism professor at NYU, writes:
There is a particular vitality in anxiety, a sort of nervy power that one can’t say is fun, exactly, but is nonetheless slightly addictive. It can be productive, in a crashing way. It gives us a feeling of motion, of momentum, of wheels turning. One gets used to it, maybe seeks it out. One inhabits it, sets up camp.…
This is pretty much what we know from experience: some stress, not overwhelming, crippling waves of it, spurs you on, makes you feel alert, alive. Stress is challenge and challenge is, well, kind of a good thing, though we might prefer a lazy day in the sun…
Kierkegaard said: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” which gets at the very particular counter-intuitive joy of it. It is the bone-deep experience of possibility. Another way to think about this is that if you are safe, you are bored. If you feel comfortable, you lack desire. We think of stress as an unfortunate side effect of busy modern urban life; we tend to imagine that if we were all shepherds lounging with flutes in emerald grass, we would be bucolically redeemed but, in fact, stress may be a sign of engaging life fully or at least intelligently apprehending it.
The aura of calm, of contentedness does not have the same frisson as anxiety; it does not draw in or seduce with the edginess of its charm. It’s not attractive in the way that anxiety is…
Do we fall a little bit in love with our anxiety, are we attached to it? It gives a kind of sharpness, a crisp focus to our days that might otherwise be passed in a haze. Communing with phantom terrors sharpens our pleasure; it lends drama or spark to routine. An overdeveloped sense of precariousness makes you appreciate some pretty basic things.
Yeah.
Most of the time — during the academic year, at least — I feel like the clown at the circus, balancing spinning plates on the top of dowels. More sticks get added with more plates to be kept spinning. I feel perpetually taxed, as if at any moment the whole lot of plates will come crashing down. Like the clown, I have the capacity and the authority to wave off additional plates, and even ask that some be taken from me — but I rarely exercise that option. Saying “No” is my super power… and yet, I keep saying “Yes.”
I know I"m alive.