Anxiety, Uncertainty, and Other People: It's Complicated

Yesterday, I was irritable while sitting alone on a bench outside my apartment building. I was waiting to meet a friend of mine. People that I didn't know kept walking past me while I was sitting there.

I kept checking the time. I don't like to wait. I can wait in the abstract sense. What I especially dislike is waiting in public. It makes me feel insecure and anxious. I feel defensive. I feel like I have to justify being there, wherever it is I am while I'm waiting for someone or something.

I also dislike the uncertainty of not knowing when whatever I'm waiting for is going to happen, or when the person I'm meeting will arrive. Normally, I don't care so much when something is not in my control. It bothers me when I feel like something is not in my control *and* that I have no other alternative. I don't like to feel boxed in. I also don't like having nothing to do but wait.

I can't even talk to myself while I'm waiting, because people in public think you're weird or not entirely there if you talk to yourself while other people are around. It's how I sort my thoughts. It's just easier for me to think when I can hear my own voice, choosing words to match my feelings. Sometimes, I'm not entirely sure what I'm thinking until I can find words to express myself.

When I'm alone, I don't mind uncertainty as much. Uncertainty bothers me more when it involves other people. If I'm going somewhere by myself, it doesn't matter very much to me whether I am lost for a bit or whether I don't know what I'm doing. When I'm with other people, not knowing where I'm going or what I'm doing make me very nervous. I feel like people are judging me for not having a better idea of what I'm doing.

While I was alone yesterday, I lamented that I let the potential criticisms of other people affect me so easily. I wondered if I worry so much about what people think because I have a high regard for the opinions of other people. If I had a lesser view of humanity, perhaps it would be easier for me to not take the treatment of others so personally.

I'm not a very secure person. I have achieved some meaningful things, but I still have many doubts. There are still areas of my life that plague me with insecurity. My interactions in public with other people are one area of my life that still flusters me from time to time.

Because I feel less insecure when I feel more control over a situation, I often prefer to do things by myself. Spending time around other people can drain me, especially if most of them are strangers and I have to consider the impression I'm making. I have spent much of my life concerned that I'm about to say or do something unbearably embarrassing. My concern about the reactions of other people is an instinct of self-preservation, but now I'm wondering if it's an instinct that preserving me or whittling away my confidence.

Resistance Is Strength

I first wrote the following thoughts in the weeks after I completed a course on Friedrich Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil". Most of the ideas below reflect but do not necessarily emulate Nietzsche's thinking - that would be impossible, because I am not Friedrich Nietzsche, and because I am hardly qualified or well-read enough to suppose that I could speak for him. Yet I can speak for myself, so here are some of my thoughts:

I have had an insight: resistance is strength. Neither acceptance nor denial of anything is enough to develop and build strength. Resistance is key.

Why resistance? Because children leave their parents and become adults. Because human beings form their own identity from the remains of their youth: the inspiration of their families and the influence of their peers. You tear down a muscle and you rebuild it – you nourish and flex and try your muscles until you're stronger. You test yourself against your fears. You prove yourself abler than you imagined. This resistance is how children become independent, compassionate, responsible adults. They resist!

Why resistance? Because intimacy is unspeakably powerful. Because people bring down their pride and their ego and share it with another person, or with an audience. Because our vulnerabilities can lead to our greatest passions and our greatest ambitions. When you feel lonely, you write. When you feel depressed, you tell jokes. When you feel isolated, you try new things. Limitations inspire creativity and fuel new horizons. Ask an author - (or a lover) - (or a comedian). They resist!

Why resistance? Because resistance is the catalyst of rebirth. Because gradual change accumulates to demolish old structures and creates a more astonishing order -- an order that is partly new, but entirely distinct and wondrous in its innovation. Because the entire process of biological evolution demonstrates the destruction and brutality and wastefulness of life itself: everything a challenge, a struggle, or a fight to the death. We emerge, we live, and we fight back...against astronomical odds. We resist!

Why resistance? Because the ability to incorporate novel ideas into existing beliefs is how knowledge advances. Because the abilities to accept nuance, to accept uncertainty, to reject uncertainty for something more powerful, to keep searching, and - most of all - to challenge your own biases, your own complacency, your own comfort...are all forms of resistance. Our world is not a black-and-white, always accept or always reject, kind of world. We inhabit a hazardous hypothesis, turbulent theory world. We resist!

Why resistance? Because it’s not wrong to make mistakes, but it’s wrong to keep making the same mistakes. Because evil isn't entirely your fault, but ignoring evil is your fault. Find the darkness in yourself and confront it. Recognize that you are its rightful owner: put it in its rightful place. Don’t blame someone else, a god, or a demon. Take responsibility for your vulnerabilities, anxieties, and fears. Realize that good intentions or inexperience, by you or by authority figures, may lead to evil. You must think for yourself. So, resist!

Resistance is strength: Because it's as profound an insight as anything in scriptures. Avoiding temptation isn't enough: temptation must be dared, lured, and faced. Evil isn't the opposite of the good: evil is a lack of the good. (Thomas Aquinas and I agree.) Evil is dishonesty - not enough honesty. Evil is ignorance - not enough knowledge. Evil is weakness - not enough patience or discipline. Evil is miscalculation - not enough empathy or foresight. You can't eliminate evil: you can only change it until it’s good. So, resist!

Resistance is strength: Because there has never been a world without temptation. Temptation is in the competition, the arms race, the nonstop grudge matches of nature. Our world's built on temptation, made in the image of temptation, dedicated to temptation. We can't create a more just world by merely overcoming that temptation: we must alter that temptation for our own purposes. We must incorporate that temptation into new ethics and new ways of living. We will neither accept nor deny temptation: we shall resist!