I’m an anxious person. I’ve been like this as long as I can remember. Worried. Worried about something. Usually intangible things. Sometimes this anxiety seeps over, drips down into my guts and I feel physically unwell. Sometimes it’s just in my head. Wherever it resides it is always just around the corner. Others certainly have it worse. It may be a problem of modernity. We’re all constantly being inundated with bad news and, even worse, others’ good news. For me, I know it’s not just the modern world, I can’t think of a single conscious moment in my life (four years old is perhaps the earliest) where I wasn’t susceptible to laying in bed and thinking through the many, and most horrendous, outcomes that could come my way. Strange little kid.
I made the mistake of studying Philosophy as an undergrad. This, of course, compounded the issue. Gave me new and incredible (pedantic and boring, really) ways to unpack reality. As it turns out, I was right to be worried all the time. The world is and always has been an overlapping of catastrophes. Our parents had nuclear war at their doorstep and unsurprisingly events are nothing if not cyclical. Humans do have the capacity for beauty. I work in an art museum where that beauty is on full display. Of course, nearly every artifact in our possession was either stolen or has ties with a rich sociopath (likely both!). This all to say, life is hard.
Two things have been constant in my life as a way to shut off the anxiety: martial arts and writing. Shut off may be going too far. Martial arts won’t let you be anxious, not exactly. There’s no time when a person who outweighs you by fifty pounds wants to take your foot home and feed it to their children. Here, the anxiety is, at least, purely existential. There’s a problem to solve, a limb to protect. I’ve written about it before, but my main martial arts practice is Jiu Jitsu. The art of the little guy, or so they say. The art of getting smooshed. The art, really, of patience and persistence. I’m a purple belt which means nothing to ninety percent of the world. For those who know, they know it means that every white belt on earth wants to kill me and if I can survive a round with a high school wrestler, the fact that we’re always living halfway through the apocalypse doesn’t quite bother me as much. This is mostly because after those rounds I’m trying with all my might not to throw up.
The truth is Jiu Jitsu actually makes me more anxious than anything else I do. The walk from my car to class is filled with an intense desire to bury myself in the ground and never communicate with another person for as long as I live. Not once in my whole life have I been excited to go to (any) class. Fantastic people, camaraderie, a sense of purpose, otherworldly coaching, health, the list of positives is endless. Yet, I don’t wanna go. I want to drink coffee. I want to take a long, lonely shower. But once Jiu Jitsu is happening, that big guy from before has my neck, it doesn’t matter what I want or don’t want. You move until you’re dead.
And then there’s writing, the sister of my martial arts practice. When I finished my undergrad, they asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I said, “I want to be a novelist.” Novelist isn’t a job. Sure, there are lucky people out there who have equal parts business acumen and creative grit. I have neither, I have a compulsion to tell stories. This is a non-lucrative sickness. I want more than anything on earth for people to validate, interact, even enjoy my writing, but I’d rather be covered in ants and launched into the sun than network. Can you imagine a more terrible fate than networking? My god. There’s a balance to be struck and I’m slowly working toward it.
So, I write and I write. I write, in a way, toward nothingness. The creation of a perfect story is the story that once finished, everything else shuts off. There’s no more anxiety. There’s no more work to do. I just get to walk away and stop buzzing about. This is where the luck of being a writer is. You’ll never ever achieve the perfect story. You’ll die long before you’re even close. Luck, curse—whatever. It’s a lifetime project. None of us will ever be the perfect communicators. It’s kinda fun to try though. Try, try.
What do these two things have in common? Jiu Jitsu and writing. Recently I was sparring with the coach at my gym. I use sparring very loosely here. He’s a high-level competitor, a profoundly talented black-belt. At any moment he could snap my head off (literally). I was feeling extra tired—near death—and he said something that perfectly sums up these two endeavors. “Go through it, not to it.” This is magical. The only truly finalized project is your final breath. That’s pretty darn goth, but it’s true. Everything else is in flux. If you’re lucky, like me, you’ll have something to work through for the rest of your life. It’s the days that I imagine some endpoint when I feel the most unsure of myself. There’s beauty in doing and sorrow in finishing—maybe. Something like that.
Michael Farfel 