Hypervigilance won't keep you safe in your writing career or anywhere else

Today and every day, please remember that anxious obsession is a trauma response and not actually going to solve any of your problems (or the world's).

Like many of you, I imagine, I’ve been tempted all day to ditch work and inhale nonstop news on Twitter or CNN.

Even as I type this, I feel like my brain is still screaming the order: WATCH. WATCH. WATCH. As though once properly affixed, my eyeballs will be able to laser Vladimir Putin in half. As though I need every excruciating visual to know where I stand on Ukraine specifically and war in general. As though it’s at once immoral to be a bystander and immoral not to be one.

Here’s the thing, though: I am a human being. As such, I do not have magical powers. Neither do you. And unless we are directly involved in matters of global geopolitical strategy, our eyewitness to every terrible development and opinion available for consumption today helps exactly bupkis.

I mean, unless it helps you. If you need convincing that war is bad, watch away. If you need this information to make some important life decision, ditto. But I’m going to go ahead and guess most of you don’t. Rather, you’re like me: you feel a vague, almost obsessive conviction that you ought to be glued to something this serious. That being glued to it will somehow make the future more legible and you personally more safe. That not being glued to it is a form of denial.

Wrong. Do you know what’s actually a form of denial? Mistaking self-insertion for safety, obsession for agency, and hurting yourself for helping others.

I can change this thing that is totally out of my hands! I can fix everything I see that’s bad and broken if I just monitor and obsess about it hard enough!: this is the classic refrain of ego. Just about all of us sing it from time to time. It’s our poor, dear brains trying to sing a reassuring lullaby: We have power. We have control. We’re not ever going to die, because we’ll see it coming fast enough to run away. And we can help everyone we love escape, too.

Most of us can help the Ukrainian people in a limited way, e.g. by calling our representatives to urge sanctions and donating money to legitimate care work organizations. Please do that.

What we can’t do is change scary things over which we have no power by obsessing about them, because that isn’t how reality works.

At times like this, it’s particularly important to remind ourselves what anxious obsessions are really about.

They’re our brains trying to “solve” a deep-seated inner trauma (e.g. some primal helplessness one felt in childhood) by repeatedly basting ourselves in retraumatization (distressing circumstances over which we are helpless).

Self-retraumatization is an understandable impulse generated by our lovable inner survival-focused reptile, but it does not even incrementally bend the arc of history toward justice. Nor does it help any of us heal our own shit. So maybe we should try to put down the impulse and invest our time more wisely.

It’s less important to put down the impulse in our day-to-day lives than it is in matters of global geopolitics. Petty obsessions—a limerent crush on an unavailable coworker, a fixation on that shitlord who posted a bad review of your book—rarely impede the cause of world peace.

Nevertheless: knowing what’s actually happening inside your brain when you’re anxiously obsessed with something or someone is always going to help you. Because awareness is the first step toward cycle disruption. And this retraumatization cycle is getting you nowhere—I promise.

It is hard, hard, hard to hear a call to obsession coming from within and say “no, thank you.” No one ever succeeds in doing this 100% of the time; it’s a practice, not an achievement. But the more you practice, the better you’ll be able to meet life’s challenges with flexibility, dynamism, and creative genius. And in an industry as unpredictable as book publishing, man are those skills useful .

Here’s what’s happening inside you when you become anxiously obsessed with something or someone: your brain is moving into survival mode.

When you begin to obsess, the reptile part of you has decided you are in the presence of some as-yet-undefeated foe from your past: someone who didn’t love you the way they were supposed to; something terrible you witnessed. Sauron’s forces are back in Gondor, so to speak, and this time, you want to wipe him out once and for all.

In the face of such a challenge, your reptile brain, bless that thing, will summon the cavalry of every available neuron into one laser-focused problem-solving force. Unchecked, it will thence charge forth at the problem, full of the deep, thrilling, slightly sick self-sacrificial energy of those Rohan guys following the Rohan king into Gondor screaming “DEATH! DEATH!”

This…sort of works? Sort of. So loosed, your inner Rohirrim will kill plenty of Sauron’s minions. This will make you feel addictive, heroic, righteous feelings—until the moment you realize that Sauron himself, the real foe, is not actually in Gondor at all, and he never has been. OOPS!

Sauron is a stupid abstract eye in a tower hundreds of miles away. You’re going to have to vanquish him more slowly and with a little more subtlety than an open-air cavalry charge. And like the exasperating final Lord of the Rings movie itself, the work of that is basically never going to end until you’re sitting next to Sir Ian McKellen on a boat to Elf Heaven. (By which I mean dead. You’re dead.)

Oh for God’s sake, Anna, what does this have to do with book publishing…or anything

Here’s why: a career in publishing is a nonstop parade of interpersonal trauma triggers, especially if you’re an author. There’s deep vulnerability and uncertainty involved. There are tons of oranges to compare your apples to, and some of those oranges are absurdly attractive and popular—way more than you suspect your apple ass will ever be.

There’s perceived neglect as you wait months and months for editorial reads. There’s rejection on rejection on rejection, even if you’re ultimately successful. And the rejections never stop, even if you are. They just start coming with a side of occasional success.

Oh, and did I mention the financial unpredictability and precarity? The inevitable drawn-out periods of creative and professional stasis? The interpersonal conflicts that tend to arise seemingly out of thin air, because psst, there are a lot of highly sensitive artistes in the world of letters?

AND THE HOT PEOPLE, MY GOD. If you are prone to crushing on brooding, visionary, sensitive, unhinged, damaged people who are absolutely 100% going to hurt your feelings in the short or long term, I have bad news about the occurrence of people like this per capita in creative fields.

At some point, if you work as an author, I guarantee you—I guarantee you—that you’ll feel your inner Rohan king start rallying the troops to charge. You’ll be churned up by something or another—a frenemy’s inclusion on a “best of” list; an overwhelmed editor taking months to turn around a memo; a crush’s disinterest in your work—and every part of you will want to respond with obsession.

To reiterate, your reptile brain thinks that’s how you’ll vanquish the problem: by charging at it, staring at it, thinking about it nonstop. But this is alas incorrect. What this plan will actually do is freeze you in place, stubbornly tilting at one B-list problem in a world where there are more pressing problems basically everywhere.

For instance: you might get so focused on why you’re not on that “best of” list that you use up your pre-pub bandwidth for planning launch events. Or maybe you’ll stay up all night freaking out about that one potentially problematic phrase you didn’t catch on page 100, ending up so exhausted that you come off like a flesh-eating bridge troll in a big media interview the next day. We don’t want this for you.

Anxious obsession isn’t love. It is also not intelligence. Anxious obsession is just your valiant but stupid reptile survival instinct drawing you back and back toward pointless self-harm.

I hate how easy it is to be triggered to anxious obsession in this world. I hate all the ways we human beings hurt each other, sending one another on journeys of trauma and retraumatization large and small.

I want us all to be safe, to have peace, to play. I’m enraged that so many stunted man-babies in power are cool with obliterating that for completely innocent people.

Yes, and. I know, I know, I know that neither you nor I can obsess pain and suffering away. So let’s give ourselves at least the occasional mercy of not giving into the temptation. Our actual power to change the world depends on it.