What if... I was surrounded by helpers?

An illustrated tour to show how I'm slowly letting go of anxiety

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We’re just back from a rainy week away in Wales. I spent the week mostly sitting quietly in our little prefab bungalow, feeding the sparrows, watching the horses at the bottom of the garden damply chew the fence posts while rowdy gangs of starlings dared each other to fly up and perch on their backs. There was a miniature steam train (which I rode twice) and a miniature arcade (I won a plastic Donald Duck keyring and Wonder Woman plushie) and far-from-miniature ice creams which I ate far too many of.

Holidays do me a lot of good, even scruffy, wet ones like this one. Give me a chance to rest somewhere new, without the push and pull of my normal life, and I’ll often come away with new clarity over something-or-other, usually something I’ll realise I’ve been chewing over for a while, like a fence post in the rain.

This week, I did a lot of thinking about my anxiety. For a long time, I’ve known that the single biggest obstacle to my health and healing is how anxious I can get sometimes. I say this with no shame or defence — it’s just true for me. My chronically unwell physiology is already so easily pulled into states of high alert. This will likely always be true, but instead of being able to move and flow in and out of my body’s reactive states, when anxiety arrives, it sits itself on the emergency button and won’t budge. No recovery or balance is possible while it's running the show.

I don’t believe you can ‘win’ against things like anxiety (what you resist persists, right?). I do believe in working with things gently, creatively, with as much fun and curiosity as you can, so that’s what I’ve been trying to do for a while. It’s helped a lot, but it’s been obvious that I still have some work to do; figuring out how to manage this tendency in myself that believes that the Big Bad is waiting around every corner.

New insight came from a deep dive into the writings of Carol K Anthony, a scholar and philosopher of the I Ching. Anthony described anxiety in a new way for me. She sees it as a natural response to faulty belief that the world is hostile, frightening, and the only good things are the ones you can make happen on your own (which we are often wholly unequipped to do). Dropping into this belief felt very true to me. When I’m anxious, I do believe this. Life is scary. I’m surrounded by things that want to hurt me. I know it’s all up to me and I can’t do this.

Anthony (and the I Ching’s) advice is simple: I need to realise I have made a mistake. What if I wasn’t alone in a hostile, frightening world? What if I was, in fact, surrounded, constantly, by forces willing and eager to help me? Do I believe this, I asked myself? And a quieter, truer voice than the one my anxiety uses said yes. Yes I do.

So, I spent my holiday week exploring the idea of ‘helpers’. Call them spirits, call them energy, call them silly, creative, reassuring, entirely imaginary visualisations; it doesn’t matter. What matters is, when I turn away from the clamour of my anxious voice, I can feel them. I know they’re there. Why do I forget that so often? Remembering them helps.

Because I’m me, I decided to draw some of these helpers, or at least some silly representations of what they feel like.

Let me take you on a tour then of a few of the helpers/forces I really do think are at work in my life, with the caveat that I’m sure that there are even more!

First though, we better start with my Creatures…

Oh, hello Creatures. Here are the anxious little souls that live in my body. These are the parts of me that really do believe I live in a world without spirit, without help. They think life is only suffering. Life is all about what you can get and what you can lose, and that’s it. It’s all bad, all the time, and it’s only going to get worse. Poor little guys. They’ve got it all so wrong! And yet they wail and they shriek and they cry and they shake until I can’t think straight. Worse — all their caterwauling means my helpers can’t get close. THAT’S the big tragedy of my life, not my illness, not any circumstance: I have a whole squad of helpers waiting patiently around me, so loving, so clever and so keen, but when the Creatures run the show, these helpers struggle to do their work.

Let’s meet them, one by one.