Notes on the inner world of worries
“When i am worried”, Versace says, “i draw”. I am paraphrasing but this is broadly the sentiment in one of the many memorable scenes in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. And it’s a sentiment i’ve related to ever since i saw it, except for me it’s not pictures, it’s words. Writing is one of my ways to deal with my inner world of worries.
In some instances, this blog becomes less about the documentation of a professional journey, but more about documenting inner journeys that one day or another end up affecting our professional lives. The single best thing anyone’s ever said about my writing is they feel seen, so here’s some things i see when things get darker than i’d like them to be.
Emotions hit you when you least expect them. This is both the peril and joy of learning to trust them (a lifetime’s work in itself). Peril because it does feel dangerous to know you’re not in the driver’s seat of your own perceptions. Joy because this is oddly comforting, as it’s not all on you. Whew.
Circumstances don’t even have to make sense. I’ve had depressive episodes while having some of the best holiday breaks i can remember. I recently had an anxiety attack on my daughter’s birthday. In purely logical terms, these things don’t make sense. Until you somehow connect some dots.
Let’s stay with this last episode. It happened on February 5th, 2025. My daughter was having a wonderful morning as we were packing from a short trip to the English seaside, and my inner passenger was raging like mad. What. The. Fuck. Except this was about a year after the last time i had spent time with my mum, a bad piece of feedback at work had triggered another bad piece of feedback from a year prior (which preceded me being made redundant), and that was sufficient for my brain to decide that was gonna be the moment we lash out on my partner. Fun times!
The guilt cycle is real. The moment you feel your emotions bursting out of you, often the guilt of knowing you didn’t pay attention to them early enough shows up as well. This is often my pattern. I hold up and try to fix things by myself, until i realise after an exchange of harsh words that my inner demons are not my partner’s fault, and she was indeed right to point out 8 months ago that perhaps it might be good to go back to therapy for a little while to cope with losing my mother.
Anxiety will always find a reason. If it weren’t this, it might have been something else. In that sense, you don’t lose your anxious predispositions, you just find ways to avoid them latching on to so many things, all at once. Except of course, all you can do is avoid this, not get rid of it completely. And this is where knowing what you can control (your response to your emotions, if not the emotions themselves, as a start) helps a load.
So, apart from writing about this to help keep the worries at bay, are there any practical lessons?
Yes. An obvious one is that no one would have guessed i was dealing with this level of internal turmoil based on observing outside behaviour, so much so that even i only realised i was so deep into this until it was a bit too late for it to be properly managed. And so, never assume to know what your colleagues, peers or indeed clients are going through while they speak, make decisions or decide to act in any shape or form.
A less obvious lesson is that the discipline of systems thinking applies as much to our own internal systems, as it does to external ones. My basic understanding of this discipline is that in complex systems, unlike complicated ones, a small change in one part of the system can create enormous damage in other significant parts, because of the level of inter-connectedness between it all. But when you look inwards, you notice similar dynamics. And the clearer we get at spotting the problem and knowing to some degree where it comes from, the more we can avoid it, or at least remedy it before it gets too big.
The strategist in me likes to think our job is to solve problems, but perhaps every now and then all we can settle for is to avoid bigger ones to emerge instead.
