Editor of The Atlantic, Scott Stossel, suffers from anxiety, and he’s hardly alone. In an essay called “Surviving Anxiety,” Stossel chronicles his lifetime battle with the nation’s most common mental illness, describing himself from the age of two on as “a twitchy bundle of phobias, fears, and neuroses.”
After failed attempts to use therapy, drugs, and booze to manage his condition, Stossel describes his essay as a “coming out” story, and writes in hopes of providing others with evidence that they too can “cope and even thrive” in spite of the illness. Stossel concludes that his anxiety “remains an unhealed wound,” but is open to the possibility that his anxiety might also be “a source of strength and a bestower of certain blessings.”
My anxiety can be intolerable. But it is also, maybe, a gift—or at least the other side of a coin I ought to think twice about before trading in…whatever quotients of emotional intelligence and good judgment I possess—not only coexist with my condition but are in some meaningful way the product of it.
