What's political about anxiety? This is a question I've been asking myself a great deal over the past months. I consider myself a political person. As a novelist I've written about espionage during the Cold War, China during the pre-Communist era, anti-miscegenation laws and interracial marriage, and the realities of the battle against sexual trafficking. As an activist I've worked to help free imprisoned journalists around the world and served as president of the literary organization PEN USA. Yet I've spent the past three years working on a book about the psychology and science of eating disorders. Why?
GAINING is a book that attempts to connect the dots between genetics, brain chemistry, behavior and belief. I was motivated to write it by the unsolved mystery of my own adolescent eating disorder and, more recently, by a brief relapse during a personal crisis in my forties. But it was also an attempt to get underneath the sense that I, like so many other women I know who have histories of eating- and other anxiety-related disorders, was holding back. I was not putting my effort where it could do the most good. I was not wholehearted in my activism. I was not willing or able to put myself fully out in the world and speak the whole truth of my experience and convictions.
Connecting the dots, I came to realize that anxiety is political precisely because those who are locked in battle with their psyches cannot be politically effective or constructive.
Just as an example, in America more than 10 million people are engaged in an all-consuming struggle with eating disorders. Their preoccupation with weight and food gives them the illusion of escape from intense anxiety, but it also prevents them from taking any effective action in reducing the real, usually external causes of that anxiety. Other anxiety-fueled conditions, such as OCD, substance abuse, and personality disorders create the same vicious cycle. Many of those whose biochemistry is locked in battle with emotional demons cannot participate at all in constructive social change. Many cannot even see past their own struggles long enough to cast a responsible vote.
Then we have those who suffer within their psychological cages but are thrown into positions of political power by others. They let their anxieties and obsessive-compulsive thinking endanger us all even as they fill us with irrational fear designed to deflect blame away from themselves. I don't have to name these "folks" for you, I'm sure.
This vicious cycle generates ever greater anxiety in America, ever more incapacitating anxiety disorders, ever less involvement by the general population in social and political progress -- because so many are locked within their psyches.
As I was finishing my book a phrase occurred to me to explain to my political friends why I was writing about eating disorders, why a condition that afflicts mostly women and is commonly derided or dismissed by men should merit my attention. This phrase applied to every individual I interviewed for my book. It certainly applied to me. But it also, I suspected, applied to every human being on the planet. And this phrase ultimately captured the message I was writing my book to convey. The phrase was: We have to unlock ourselves to release our power to change the world.
Activism is a critical antidote to anxiety. But to become effective activists we first have to stop pretending (stop posing, just for instance, as The Decider, stop blustering Bring Em On to cover our own terror, stop accusing in black and white terms You're Either With Us or Against Us) and look squarely at what's causing our fear. Maybe it's not "them" at all, but someone much, much closer to home.
We have to break the cycle of fear before we can create a cycle of peace. Psychology is political, and it's long past time we all recognized the connection.