So, reading Furiously Happy opened me up to reading more books about anxiety.

I decided to acknowledge anxiety as the uncool friend who never leaves you alone when I had my third kid. My first inkling that I was the nervous type was a day in my high school cafeteria when a guy friend suggested I was a little too uptight (*shrug* I probably was). But until now, besides the general work I’ve been doing to better understand what makes me tick and how I can cope better with my life, I had never done any reading specific to anxiety.

In typical over-achiever fashion, before I’d even finished Furiously Happy, I chose three MORE anxiety titles, for a total of four, and planned an anxiety book-reading binge. This whole time, I had a nagging feeling that an anxiety book binge was a bad idea. It was a bad idea. I finished the book I picked up after Furiously Happy, barely took a breath, and dove into a third book. I immediately hit a wall. I had two more anxiety books from the library, and no steam whatsoever. But I so enjoyed the one that I read, that I want to share it.

The book I read was But First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety, by Sarah Wilson.

I’ve read a number of books recently that were perfectly suited to audio form. This book, on the other hand, is perfectly suited to print. From its gorgeous cover, which I could get lost gazing at, to its layout, to the little asides in the margin to clarify details, I loved it immediately. It is a book for book lovers.

The content is somewhat nonlinear, but not in an infuriating way. It just invites you along for the journey. It is  inclusive; the author is writing for those without an “official” diagnosis, and those who have tried everything and struggled for years.

I want to share this book with you, but I hesitate to give too many details. The way the book unfolds is so appealing, and knowing what is going to happen next ahead of time takes away that sense of opening a thousand tiny wrapped gifts that you get from reading it.

Without divulging too much, the book takes you on Wilson’s personal journey, sharing in an organic way some of the tools she discovered along the way, as well as current multi-disciplinary research on anxiety. The book is broken into chapters, but also numbered sections. If the idea of reading about anxiety makes you nervous, the bite-sized chunks of text make it easy to digest. You walk with Wilson, and by the end feel some of the progress she’s made could be your own.

Besides the lovely layout and good reading, Wilson has a section offering illuminating suggestions and information for partners of anxious types, which actually helped me understand myself better. Many suggestions she had, I would either resonate with, or immediately know weren’t a good match. Other times, I had to think about her suggestions before I knew if it would work. It was the topic of more than a few conversations with the Chaplain, who is now reading the book for himself.

I’m glad I picked this book up first – what if I’d burned out ahead of reading it? It would have been such a loss. I started out with a library copy and ended up buying one of my own. I found it so beautiful I couldn’t bear to write in it, and didn’t want to write anything that would take away from the Chaplain’s experience of reading the book.

One of the things about learning from example while reading But First, We Make the Beast Beautiful was that somehow, I came away with the idea that I could ask for things I needed, without feeling I had to ignore my needs to “be nice.” I was already on that journey, but it felt like the book carried me a forward a few exits on the highway. A lot of things that trigger anxious behavior or things I might want to “fix” to feel better (mainly, to reduce noise, light, and smells), I have trouble asking for. It feels like too much to ask everyone to accommodate my need for quiet/no strong smells/no bright lights. But gradually I’ve gotten better at recognizing what I can and can’t deal with, and speaking up when I need to.

Real life example: This past week I picked up new glasses for the first time in several years. Typically, when I pick up my glasses, I have them readjusted 3-4 times, and they are close to a good fit, but not quite right. But I don’t want to keep asking to have them adjusted till they’re perfect, and I feel like I’m wasting the time of the person helping me. Then, I get a headache moments after walking out of the glasses place because the glasses are too tight, and struggle on my own to bend my earpieces just a little bit more to get them right, resulting in them sliding down my nose constantly. This time, I stayed with the discomfort of asking for more than I felt I was entitled to. And I walked out the door with glasses that fit. Maybe this is a function of age, maybe it is because I read the book. But I think the book helped.

If you’re an anxious sort, or know someone who is, this title should definitely be on your bedside table.

Just like I did for my Michael Pollan book shoot, I used my retouch tool to clean the dirt from under my kids’ fingernails for this photo. Because while nobody is perfect, on the internet, sometimes we get to pretend.