Making my beast beautiful: thoughts on Sarah Wilson’s book about anxiety
First, We Make the Beast Beautiful is Australian journalist and ‘I Quit Sugar’ lifestyle guru Sarah Wilson’s ‘new story’ about anxiety. It chronicles the ups, downs and in-betweens of the first forty years of her life navigating a plethora of physical and mental health issues and it does the most beautiful job of stringing together life with mental illness into a purposeful thing.
Instead of professing to Know What To Do about your anxiety, Sarah Wilson spends three hundred gentle, friendly and scorchingly honest pages chronicling all the ways she’s tried living with her anxiety and how it went for her. There’s a consistent acknowledgement that everyone’s lives and conditions are particular to them and that the common thread in any mental health journey is developing the valuable power of listening to your body and inner voice.
My psychologist opened my eyes a few years ago to this unhealthy notion that we’ve developed about happiness. The explosive rise in popularity of the positive psychology movement, combined with the relentless expectations social media injects into our lives has made ‘normal’ days feel insufficient. Happiness has become the baseline expectation of everyone’s daily life and anything below that bar feels like a problem. People flock in droves to their doctors and pharmacists looking for quick-fix solutions, when really what many of us need is a perspective shift.
It is not normal to be happy every day. Nobody expects you to be happy every day. Most of the stuff of life is normal. Messy and normal. Average days where you go about your routine and nothing terrible happens. There is nothing wrong with this. You are extremely fortunate to have all of the basic tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs fulfilled. I’m not advocating for complacency with your life; self-actualisation is a noble goal. Instead, I’m advocating for appreciating the small moments of life and insisting that we have the power to reframe ‘boredom’ to ‘contented’.
Along these lines, Wilson encourages us all to lean into where ever we are at mentally. She cites many studies that posit that the origins of mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, bipolar and OCD are in important biological survival functions. These conditions have a biological purpose. Recognising and appreciating this purpose is how you ‘make your beast beautiful’. We all know that old adage about a large portion of bipolar sufferers being incredibly intelligent, sensitive creatives and scientists (Stephen Fry’s Secret Life of the Manic Depressive is a great place to learn more about this). Well, take that adage a step further. Recognise that anxiety has its perks. It is biologically rooted in the alertness required to survive threats in the wild.
For me, Wilson’s book helped me acknowledge that my anxiety is also what grants me emotional attunement, which makes me a great listener and friend. It grants the power of hyper-observance, which means I notice details and have a good design and proofreading eye — handy things, when working in the digital sphere. I always remember important dates and numbers. I enjoy organising data and transforming messy business problems into clear processes that benefit everyone. These qualities have enabled me to pursue a career in game development that I love.
Wilson isn’t pro- or anti- medication. The whole book is as non-judgemental as you can get for a self-help tome. She is encouraging of any and all tools that you might need to get through your particular set of realities; you know your body and its needs best. The only thing she’s dogmatic about is the importance of knowing yourself. Of looking inwards and getting in touch with your inner self — whatever that means for you. Because it is this awareness that enables you to identify your own beast and its beautiful qualities.
There’s no way I could have articulated the above list of qualities about myself five years ago. I’m about to turn thirty and I’m proud of the time and work I have spent getting to understand myself. Where I used to feel confusion and despair in the face of negative emotions, I now feel like I sit at the helm of a dashboard that enables me to understand what’s going on when certain emotions surface. Not only can I tell when I feel bad and let other people know, often I can perceive why. This ability takes practice and listening. It takes slowing down enough when you’re feeling bad to really listen to the little voice inside of you that is yelling at the top of its tiny voice as to what is really going on inside your head. But five years ago? I could barely tell my partner when I felt sad. I would react first and rush forward with life, fully focused on ‘productivity’ and never slowing down enough to sit and listen to what was going on inside.
This stuff takes work, but its the most worthy work of your life.
Acceptance, of what lies within yourself, over a determined belief that once you ‘finish’ transforming yourself, you will be complete, is the key takeaway that Wilson leaves us with.
You are already complete. You are enough. You are a whole and beautiful person in all your struggles and messiness. You are not broken and do not need fixing. A simple truth, but one so delicate in the face of the society we live in. A society that is determined to categorise and question you until you’re sure that ‘happiness’ lies at the end of today’s virtual shopping cart.
Wilson introduces dozens of useful reframing tricks to help shift your perspective. A great, practical example is ‘anxiety reappraisal’. It’s the idea that simply re-labeling your anxiety through a lens you choose can turn anxious feelings to your advantage. Simply saying ‘I’m excited’ out loud when faced with a nerve-racking situation can improve performance during anxiety-inducing activities, according to recent research. As The Atlanic’s Olga Khazan explains:
“…anxiety and excitement are both aroused emotions. In both, the heart beats faster, cortisol surges, and the body prepares for action. In other words, they’re “arousal congruent.” The only difference is that excitement is a positive emotion‚ focused on all the ways something could go well.”
We’re typically told to calm down, relax, or ‘keep calm and carry on’ when faced with anxiety inducing situations. But excitement’s biological proximity to anxiety may mean that reframing your anxiety as excitement is the smarter way to take advantage of the excess of cortisol swirling through your body.
While useful and interesting, Wilson’s book does meander at times. First, Make the Beast Beautiful is deeply personal. Some of the moments described are so poignant and precisely relatable to my own experience that I couldn’t help but grab my pencil and heavily underline the insights Wilson shared. She possesses fantastic emotional insight into what it’s like to be a white middle class woman struggling with anxiety in the modern age modern Australia. But that’s kind of the thing. Although Wilson acknowledges her privilege a handful of times, this analysis does not go very deep, which results in a few cringeworthy gaps in perspective.
While the book is well researched (there is nary a paragraph un-referenced), Wilson’s book is knee-deep in the milieu of positive psychology. While it fights tooth-and-nail against many of the damaging concepts positive psychology has popularised, about half of Wilson’s references are to pop-science books that promote those same ideas (the other half being references to scientific articles). Of course, this a biographical book and Wilson is writing about her own experiences so fair enough that she comes across as extremely... Anglo. But things started to get uncomfortable when Wilson shared her ashram experiences. Cataloguing practices from Asian (usually Hindu) spirituality alongside mental reframing tricks felt cheapening and reductive. Wilson could have done better with her handling of these topics. But of course, the discomfort of reading about white people drawing willy-nilly from spiritual practices from around the world in their quest for inner peace is hardly a new problem.
Despite its shortcomings, there are valuable nuggets peppered throughout First, We Make the Beast Beautiful and anyone who suffers anxiety or depression will find Wilson’s scorching honesty and grounded perspective on how best to survive life with these conditions refreshing.
