Writing Anxiety Through an Existentialist Lens

Writing is often anxiety producing. The experience has become so widespread for students that many college and university writing centers have information about how to deal with it (for instance: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/writing-anxiety/ and https://www.vanderbilt.edu/writing/resources/handouts/coping-with-writing-anxiety/). This information is often quite useful, and I would recommend their practical advice to those who are struggling. But I want to explore why this anxiety arises to begin with. To do so, I propose situating writing within the human condition broadly construed—the struggle to create meaning and to create our very selves, and the uncertainty of ourselves in the midst of that struggle and in the face of others’ responses to us. Anxiety is a normal part of these experiences, but perhaps we can be freed rather than paralyzed by them. I turn here to Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt to help us think through these possibilities.

Existentialism sees anxiety as a central part of human existence. Why? Because, as Sartre puts it, freedom is terrifying. Why that’s so can be summed up in another phrase from Sartre: existence precedes essence. So what the heck does that mean? The basic idea is that human beings are self-creative beings, as opposed to non-humans. While non-humans are determined by their essence, the kind of thing they are, human beings are capable of a broad range of possibilities while still remaining human. Both Mother Theresa and Hitler were human, though importantly different kinds of humans. These two examples suggest the basic insight that who we human beings become is the result of our choices and actions—if I act like a jerk, I become a jerk; if I act with kindness, I become kind. Similarly with things like career choices: I become a professor or a carpenter by doing professor-like or carpenter-like things until they are second nature to me. We might say that human beings are always in the midst of becoming rather than simply being who we are.

That I create myself through my actions and choices means that I am radically free—who I become is up to me. With radical freedom comes radical responsibility—I cannot blame anyone else for who I am. On the one hand, this freedom can be profoundly empowering, enabling me to make choices for myself apart from expectations and pressures from others. On the other hand, it’s terrifying, as Sartre put it: who I become is up to me and only me. And hence the notion of anxiety within existentialism: the weight of the choices we must make can become overwhelming, since our very being is at stake. And I can’t not choose. To refuse to choose is to choose! I can never be sure that I made the right choice, which only deepens the feeling of anxiety. Anxiety, then, is something like the flip side of freedom. And it is likely to arise whenever my existence as such becomes a question for me.

Writing can raise some of these experiences for us. Putting my thoughts and ideas on paper can feel like an existential commitment: I’m putting myself out in the world, opening myself to criticism. I feel exposed and raw. What if I’m wrong? What if I’m misunderstood? What if someone thinks I’m stupid? In the academic context in particular, in which thinking is the work, these are very real fears. To state the obvious, it’s the anticipated judgment that drives our anxiety. Some of us sit with that anticipation throughout the writing process itself, which can indeed lead to paralysis.

What if we rethought these experiences in light of the insights of existentialism? What if writing were not about exposing ourselves but creating ourselves? What if we saw the self so created as provisional, up for revision and re-creation? What if we saw input from others not (only) as potential condemnation but as helping us figure who we have become and whether we want to become someone else? What if, in short, we viewed writing as an existential practice of freedom? Such a shift would require rethinking the role of judgment in our writing as well, a possibility I think Hannah Arendt can help with.

In The Human Condition, Arendt distinguishes who we are from what we are. “What” we are is the combination of facts about us (sex, gender, character traits, abilities, limitations, etc.)—aspects of ourselves we might share with others—while “who” we are is our unique self that can only be revealed through action and speech. Part of the problem here is that in acting and speaking, we are caught up in what we’re doing and hence cannot witness ourselves as actors and speakers. We thus need others to reflect us back to ourselves, allowing us to see ourselves through their eyes. Indeed, it is only in being reflected back to ourselves that we can know ourselves at all. Knowing ourselves requires this reflection from multiple others, since different people come from different perspectives and can notice different things about us. Without those perspectives, we can seriously misunderstand ourselves. What if I’m racist and don’t realize it? I need someone to tell me! What if I’m trying to be encouraging but end up being unintentionally critical? I need someone to tell me! It’s not always easy to hear such things, but we must be willing to if we want to know ourselves; only then can we decide if we want to remain that way. Because existentialism is right: I can always create myself to be differently.

The relevance of Arendt’s insights to writing is perhaps obvious: to know even my own thinking requires feedback from multiple others, and it’s important to hear from people who disagree with me and are willing to challenge me. That might be dissertation committee members or peer reviewers. If I heard only from people who agreed with me, my argument might remain unclear, because my generous readers are filling in the gaps unconsciously. Only if my writing is as clear as it can be might I convince someone who is otherwise skeptical of my argument. But I will never convince everyone, of course. I must be able to address legitimate criticisms, however, and I remain convinced that doing so helps clarify my own thinking. This point is all the clearer, I think, when we acknowledge that not all our readers can be right. Our committee members and peer reviewers often disagree with each other about our work, and it becomes our job to respond in a way that’s true to our own thinking. That might mean clarifying our writing or our argument; it might mean rethinking aspects of our work; and it might mean articulating how and why we think someone’s point is off the mark or misunderstands us. (If, however, someone is simply dismissive of us or mean, if their comments do not help us advance our thinking, I think it’s safe to dismiss them in turn!)

If others’ judgments actually help us think things through, perhaps we can learn to welcome them rather than only be anxiety-ridden by them. That doesn’t necessarily mean that anxiety will go away, but it may be mitigated by the hope of self-discovery and self-creativity. And perhaps we can remind ourselves of another insight from Arendt: though it may feel as if who we are is at stake in our writing, it really isn’t. At most, what we think at a particular moment is at stake. But who we are is considerably more complicated than what we think. It’s certainly true that many of us project onto our favorite authors who we think they are based on their writing, but we can be horribly wrong: Martin Heidegger’s Nazism seems to me completely out of synch with his analysis of human existence in Being and Time, so learning about it both surprised and disappointed me; similarly, many fans of the Harry Potter series (including me) see JK Rowling’s anti-trans beliefs to be equally out of synch with their beloved books and are also surprised and disappointed. But really, our expectations about who they are were based on far too little to be accurate. None of us can be reduced to one aspect of our lives, and writing for any of us is just that: one aspect. I suspect that we tend to project onto our favorite authors because their writing is all we know of them.

One of the reasons our own writing feels so weighty, I think, is because putting what we think out into the world opens us up to more scrutiny than we usually endure; it is the closest we come to being in the public sphere, which is the realm of judgment for Arendt. But it is also the realm of freedom, where we can act in concert with others to co-create a shared world. Perhaps we can reframe writing as a contribution to that grand project. We can see writing as a creative endeavor, through which we form and shape ourselves and insert ourselves in a community of others whose perspectives have the potential to enrich and alter us. Writing can thus become a genuine practice of freedom, opening us up to being surprised by who we have become and welcoming the chance to create ourselves and each other anew. Thus might anxiety be mitigated by freedom.

Further reading:

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Sarah Blakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness