If you had asked me what I wanted most in life just one year ago, I would have buoyantly responded with: a book deal and a successful writing career. As my aptitude for setting professional goals stretches back even further — a circled “1500” signaling my goal SAT score, a nine-page recount of a leadership development conference I went to when I was 17 and a crisply flattened picture of me and my mom after we toured Vanderbilt are among the many artifacts of my high school journal. Preoccupied by the stress of standardized tests and classwork, the purple ink in that journal is the mark of a person dominated by an almost entirely different set of standards and values from the person I am now.
In the years since, as my anxiety has escalated, many of my professional goals have been drowned out by the cacophony of my own thoughts. Success, in my mind, used to take the shape of a degree from a university many people perceive to be “great” and a job that people perceive to be equally as “great.” Now, success takes the shape of my hands — steady, unflinching from anxiety — and a mind that hasn’t worried itself sick wandering to the “Worst Case Scenario.” I’ve watched my world fold in on itself, watched the measurable goals that once constituted my life’s meaning dissolve like unstirred honey at the bottom of a teacup: sticky, too concentrated to be useful. While I used to think of my life in years, I now think of it in days — if not hours. Within the last year, the scale of my life shrunk as my anxiety grew, completely shifting the standards I hold myself to: What I want most in life now is, most prominently, to be at peace with myself, followed by people to love and be loved by and financial stability.
Although my anxious thought patterns were the most pervasive this last summer and fall semester, these patterns are still very much muscle memory. Catastrophizing that phone call with a friend that was a few minutes too short is now second nature; impulsively playing mental reruns of daily interactions and overthinking fleeting moments of eye contact are now habits.
In the throes of my anxiety, the last thing I was thinking about was a future career, or a new club to join. And now, as I live alongside the remnants of that anxiety, I struggle to look beyond what’s currently in front of me. Recursive and overpowering, my anxious thought patterns dizzy me. They extend beyond the point of attempting to make plans for a future that seems so abstract. Because the more I think, the less my thoughts make sense; and the less my thoughts make sense, the more I think. At the height of my anxiety, all I wanted was control over myself and my thoughts — which is why I so incessantly relied on these familiar, albeit destructive, patterns. I believed that if I played back these moments enough times I could eventually rewrite them. It was a cruel iteration of the very human craving for comfort by way of habits and familiarity.
It’s no secret that humans are creatures of habit, and, as a self-proclaimed organized, type-A person, I’ve always prided myself on maintaining a specific brand of habits: prioritizing school even at the cost of my sleep or wellbeing, filling out my planner months in advance, never leaving my bed unmade. However, my anxious mind preyed on my affinity for structure and turned it on its head. In my most anxious months, there was no place that felt as safe to wander as the well-worn paths of the same “Worst Case Scenarios” I had played out in my head hundreds of times before. While I knew that my shaking hands and these nightmares that had become my perennial bedtime stories were not sustainable, I didn’t know how to break the cycle I was in.
Although many articles on coping with anxiety suggest a formal, or at the very least concerted, effort to analyze your thought patterns and/or use stress management techniques, I did not feel like I had the space to take a step back and think about why my mind was going the places it was. Instead, over the next several months, I began noticing parts of daily interactions that made me grateful — not just anxious — to be experiencing the day I was experiencing. This wasn’t even a choice I remember actively making. In an unexpected way, my most anxious moments showed me what it meant to focus on something to a degree I had never experienced before, a clarity that I couldn’t remember engineering, but one that was nonetheless mine. With the increased attention to minor interactions, my anxiety imposed on me came a heightened concentration on tiny moments of daily life’s abundance.
While the phrasing of “daily life’s abundance” is a bit grating to me, I don’t know how else to explain what I’ve strived to find in the face of my anxiety. To me, this abundance is seeing duck feet imprints on the sidewalk as I’m taking my second walk of the day; it’s going on a run in the rain to pick up a pastry on two hours of sleep; it’s admiring how evenly I underlined that sentence I really liked in the book that took me a few too many weeks to finish; it’s eating a sprinkle cone that tastes like summer when I was seven outside in December after work; it’s noticing how green my eyes become after I cry; it’s pulling back my comforter at the end of the day and realizing I didn’t flinch that day. Ultimately, it’s accepting goodness with its flaws and without societal deference.
Anxiety takes different forms for different people, and, for me personally, my anxiety has forced me to focus on the quieter, less recognized forms of success in my life. Although my principal concerns at the moment are not what city I’m going to move to after graduation or how I can make space to add another experience to my resume, there is still growth and progress being made in my life, and that personal fulfillment — while not linear nor enumerated — has widened the scope of my world more than professional growth ever has.
As I do not want this article to fall into romanticizing “the little life,” I’d like to question what assumptions accompany the cultural object that is “living small.” With the rise of minimalism, many didactic self-help articles presume living simply to be an aesthetically pleasing choice with little to no acknowledgment of the presumption of agency that comes along with that. Sure, I pay more attention to the way my creamer swirls in my coffee now; I take note of the different ways chairs haphazardly inhabit people’s porches; I imagine little bridges between the stems of my “i’s” and the dots that anchor them. However, I do these things not necessarily in celebration of “the little things,” but rather as an act of self-preservation. When my mental landscape was more volatile than it ever had been, these “little things” were lifeboats in stormy waters. These changes feel less like byproducts of burnout and more like a new beginning. I have not lost motivation, instead, I have repurposed that motivation toward things that have become more meaningful to me. Not necessarily meaningful for societal approval, but meaningful for me.
This isn’t to say that my anxiety is now gone because I notice the small things, or because I have had to shift my priorities more inward. This is not an attempt to provide a universal answer that cannot be found for anxiety, but serves instead, as an attempt at articulating the isolation — and also the fulfillment — in adjusting our standards for ourselves in the face of deep anxiety and doubt.
When I look back at my high school self, this character embodied by purple ink, desperately touring schools she didn’t see herself at, this character that spent ages researching careers that could appease nondescript audiences, I see big goals defined by a very small, confined mindset. Now, I have much smaller goals with a more deliberate mindset. Further bolstered by the attention I now also give to the quiet joys around me, the priorities I have for myself, whether that’s to not overthink a conversation or to finish the book I wanted to finish the week prior, are set by me and for me. Of course, my anxiety still dominates my thoughts at times, but there’s a degree of freedom in knowing that my priorities are products of what I need and have the space for — not of what I’ve been told to prioritize and make room for.
Statement Columnist Olivia Mouradian can be reached at omouradi@umich.edu.