Narrative Strategy: What's Anxiety Got to Do with It?

I spent the last week lost in an anxiety induced fog. Usually the SSRI’s do their job and I’m not struggling to herd my thoughts and feelings into some functional direction, but this last week was harsh. And as I’m a narrative strategist, I had to find the meaning in all of it. Make sense of the struggle, because that’s what humans do. We need to do it in order to not drown in our thoughts or let the vice of emotions crush us into tiny pieces of dust. We need to do it to survive.

And as I walked the dog this morning, finally feeling my body ease into it’s normal equilibrium and the cacophony of hyper-vigilance slow to a manageable rhythm, it occurred to me…what is the point of anxiety? What purpose does it serve at the biological level? I know my anxiety has it’s roots in intergenerational trauma and epigenetics, and the years of (effective) therapy were always about finding some form of integration and resolution. It was about taking the pieces of explosive emotions and disjointed events and piecing them together into sequences…sequences that became stories and stories that became a narrative; a narrative that gives us meaning. This is an established approach in narrative and trauma therapy, but I’m not an expert on it and won’t pretend to be.

Instead, I tried to decipher the pieces of meaning. Is meaning found when we integrate the messiness of emotions, memory and context? Do we integrate by telling stories? Stories that “make sense” to us? But not just the stories our anxious brains might run away with, but the stories that our bodies understand as well?

I think anxiety comes from an evolutionary response. A need to anticipate changes in order to survive.

If we follow that line of thought, then meaning making is necessary to our survival. It’s not an intellectual exercise in analysis. It’s taking all the disparate pieces of data — the emotions, the logic, the contexts, the truths, the minutia of overwhelm, the conscious and unconscious, the materials of life— and weaving into a way to move forward. Decision making and living. Life and death.

Because death will come. So will change. So will disruption. And as long as we can make meaning of it, our existential anxieties will not be for nothing. They will allow us to live.

So how does this semi-poetic post about anxiety relate to being a narrative strategist? Well, I wrote this for me. To make sense of the noise. To find signals that matter.

But I think we’re entering a point in our collective existence where meaning making requires more attention. Where we need better practices for untangling the chaos and weaving it into survival. No, not just survival. But the ability to thrive. And thriving — that’s what we all want.