The Great Rut of 2024: what anxiety was trying to tell me

A few years ago, I was in a rut.

It was mid-2024. I’d finished a coaching diploma, completed a half marathon and had just gotten engaged. Life was good.

But I’d also recently been rejected by dozens of jobs. I felt burnt out. The engagement, while lovely, had come much sooner than I’d been expecting, along with the pressure to organise (and pay for) a wedding.

Things were going great on paper, but inside, I felt… off. I was on the cusp of 30, feeling like I was ‘running out of time’ (whatever the hell that means), with a growing urgency to make big changes - a career pivot, a wedding, travelling, moving abroad - with no real idea of how to make it happen.

There were months where I was running frantically on the spot with no direction. I knew I was transitioning towards something, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what. And though I didn’t know it yet, this was the beginning of the long road that led me to take this sabbatical from work.

I remember mid-2024 being a weirdly stressful time. Not because of anything that was actually happening, but because of the intense guilt I felt. Everything was going well, but my brain was telling me that, because I felt anxious, something must be wrong. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what.

That ambiguity was fuel to the anxiety fire.

So, in an attempt to gain some false sense of control and ‘fix’ the anxiety I was feeling, I deployed my usual tactics: analysing, strategising, researching, trawling Reddit forums for answers. Of course, I didn’t find any of those. But I did find this book.

The book that actually helped

At some point during the Great Rut of 2024, I stumbled across Living Beautifully With Uncertainty and Change, by Pema Chodron.

Pema is a Buddhist monk, teacher, mother and twice divorcee from America. I’d never heard of her before, but turns out she’s a big cheese in the Buddhism world and has written dozens of books, many of which are currently stored in my Kindle’s ‘to be read’ library.

I was drawn in by this book’s title. Quietly, I hoped that Pema would give me a step-by-step guide on how to get over myself and diffuse all my nebulous feelings. While she didn’t solve my problems (alas), this book was the turning point towards understanding my anxiety, and a helping hand out of the rut I was in.

So… how do we live beautifully with uncertainty and change?

In her refreshingly accessible writing style, Pema talks about how ungrounded life is for everyone - even the people who seem to have their shit together or are 100% assured in the choices they make.

We walk through life on shifting sand. Things are grey and complex and ever-changing. Good things don’t last, but, gladly, neither do bad things. There are no ‘correct’ answers, only decisions you make with the information you have at the time.

The problem is, our primitive brains don’t like uncertainty or discomfort. They hate it. Ironic, really, seeing as these are some of the very few consistent things about life. Uncertainty and discomfort represent ‘danger’, much like the mountain lion lurking in the grass, the snake underfoot, or any other threat our brains evolved to detect eons ago.

When life goes off-script

Uncertainty is a threat. Not just a threat to our physical selves, but to our internal selves - our ego or sense of ‘fixed identity’.

You probably know this, but we all have some kind of innate sense of self, some kind of subconscious narrative for our lives. If something threatens to take us off-script, then the brain sounds the alarm.

For example, if our fixed identity is based on being ‘good’ and ‘perfect’, then our ego will resist experiences and emotions that make it feel ‘imperfect’. This tension between the inner and outer world triggers our brain’s threat system and causes anxiety.

The ego has all sorts of strategies to create the illusion of control and preserve the identity it's created for itself - defence mechanisms that Pema calls ‘exit routes’.

Exit routes can be things like addiction, over-achievement, perfectionism, people-pleasing, workaholism, overthinking, abuse/violence, etc. All of us have some kind of exit route, though some are more maladaptive than others.

Pema writes about resisting our exit routes because, well, they don’t really work.

There’s no escaping uncertainty or negative emotions in life. The human experience is a kaleidoscope of good and bad and everything in between. Instead of avoiding our negative emotions, we might as well sit down and really look at them.

If we look our negative emotions in the eye, eventually, they lose their power. They’ll either dissolve entirely or change shape into something else.

Obviously, confronting our pain is much easier said than done. Even pro Buddhist Pema struggles to do this, likening it to being set on fire sometimes. But better that than looking away and letting the flames consume us.

Staring the anxiety in the eye

I put down Pema’s book and followed her advice. Instead of pushing the anxiety away, I leant into it. I journaled about it over months, drew pictures that represented how I was feeling, and signed up for therapy.

By looking it in the face, eventually the anxiety softened, morphing instead into understanding. I realised that a lot of the anxiety was inner resistance to going ‘off- script’.

My inner script had always told me that I would live a highly independent life in a foreign country with a successful, impressive career, and that my story would end with me being alone. Why? I have no idea.

But I suspect the key to this script was: no vulnerability.

Fast forward to 2024, and I wasn’t following this script at all. I was living in my hometown, working a steady civil service job, getting married, ostensibly settling down. Not exactly embodying the ‘cool, mysterious, invulnerable’ archetype my ego thought I should be. Something in me was disappointed that I hadn’t lived up to that vision.

But I was older now. I’d had more experiences, was becoming more of my own person. Maybe I didn’t actually want to be the ‘lone wolf’ trope. While free and autonomous and safe, that path can also be shallow and lonely.

I was transitioning to a new phase of life. My script was changing. I was becoming more aligned with what I actually wanted rather than the version my child self, my ego, thought was best for me.

That process of diverging and rewriting the script was… uncomfortable, to say the least.

Accepting discomfort as inevitable

Taking this sabbatical has been an exercise in uncertainty. Of trying on a different life. Of testing the script.

In the face of uncertainty, my brain still deploys its exit routes sometimes - researching, strategising, ruminating, with a bit of avoidance sprinkled in. My brain likes to believe it can think its way towards certainty and ‘correct’ answers, when that’s so rarely the reality.

I still have moments of anxiety and overwhelm - most recently while tucking into a delicious avocado and ricotta toast in Porto. But I’m a lot better than I used to be at recognising it.

Now, when my brain floats away into that soupy, anxious fog, I remember Pema’s words. I don’t try to fix it. I allow my brain to go to that place, knowing that it’ll return to base sooner or later. I observe the racing thoughts like one of those informational videos you find projected in museums - the video ends at some point, you think: ‘huh, that was interesting’ and move on.

So I find it helpful to remember that everything is changing and uncertain. Even if you play your hand ‘perfectly’, there are no guaranteed outcomes. And if you feel anxious, it doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong - sometimes, it just means something’s shifting.

If any of these ideas resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it.

Until next time,

Rose :)