Jim Carrey’s character in Yes Man, the 2008 comedy, lives a humdrum, sheltered existence lacking excitement and danger. His life soon changes after attending a motivational talk that presents him with a radical idea: to say yes to every proposition. The humour of the movie lies in the fact that Jim Carrey takes the message a little too seriously, saying yes to everything, no matter how ridiculous, no matter how dangerous. While his life turns upside down as he becomes a slave to saying yes, it also improves dramatically, generating constant excitement, joy and friendships. In the process, Jim Carrey’s character learns to appreciate the importance of being open to new experiences.
It’s a lesson I would want tattooed in my brain and heart, because I had forgotten it, enslaved by the pressures of life, focusing too much on things that make me anxious instead of things that excite me. There is something to be learned from the sheer delight children take in the things they enjoy.
When I look back at who I used to be, I remember a more open individual, which raises the question: What changed? What events have shaped my character, that I am now irrationally fearful of change, afraid of things not going according to plan, worried about what can go wrong, anxious about the future, and paralysed when I should be boldly decisive?
I cannot quite tell what events led to this anxiety, but there is always a lingering scent of, what will people say? There is a loud voice inside my head that shouts this question, yet very often after I have taken the action I feared, all the anxiety melts away, as if it were a mirage, a ghost in the road that made itself look like an obstacle.
Recently, I came across a quote attributed to Carl Jung that I can’t get out of my head: if the path before you is clear, you are probably on someone else’s. What I want is to cut through the obstacles in my mind and live a heroic life, a fulfilling life, something that has both physical thrills and spiritual rewards.
Part of building that kind of life is that I should be ready to open myself up to the world, as daunting as that sounds. It is a spiritual practice in a sense, for a person to accept who they are enough not to hide it from the world.
As a writer, I am frequently battling the anxiety of finding myself revealed in my own work. Often when reading my manuscripts, I shudder that the world will have access to my thoughts and feelings, which I feel should remain private. After my editor finished editing my debut book, A Surreal Journey of Discovery, which is a collection of short stories, I kept the manuscript locked in the proverbial drawer, hidden from the world, anxious about whether it was perfect enough, worried that the stories were so strange that the world might label me a weirdo or something. In the end, what saved me was flipping a coin. When I shared this story with a room of writers in January, everyone laughed, shocked that the question of whether to publish this book had come down to the flip of a coin.
It is a tactic I developed during COVID, when I would become so paralysed by the anxiety that filled the world in those first days when we didn’t yet understand what we were dealing with and doomsday predictions were rife on the internet. Unable to make myself do the basic things that I needed to do, like washing dishes or going out for a walk, I would flip a coin, assigning my agency to fate, to find the strength to start moving. Now, when the inability to take action paralyses me, I flip a coin.
As the world hurtles towards Armageddon, or whatever is coming, instead of becoming more paralysed, I have paradoxically become less anxious. I pray more now than I used to. Prayer has become my new coin toss. Let me entrust it to God, I think to myself, remembering that the lilies of the field are arrayed more than Solomon in all his splendour yet they neither toil nor spin. I am learning the rudiments of faith.
And that is precisely the lesson that we all need, to learn how not to fear the unknown, to learn how to say yes even when everything in us wants to say no, to learn how to move forward despite our anxiety. This means opening ourselves up to life, to experiences, to other people.
Last Friday, Nairobi was submerged in an ocean of rainwater. The next day, I had to attend an event. When I left the house, it started raining, and I had to wait in the shade until the rain reduced. Everything in me was telling me to go back to the house, but this was the event of a friend I didn’t want to let down. When I boarded a bus for the CBD, it was still raining heavily, and I was already late. It was almost evening, and I was headed to the very same CBD where over twenty people had died in floods the previous night. At that moment, I cared more about showing up for my friend than I feared dying in a flood.
Perhaps this then is the cure for anxiety: to focus more on what we care about than on what we are afraid of. By overfocusing on avoiding danger, we end up diminishing the quality of our lives. The saying goes: Let the young man in his desperation go out and hunt. If he kills the elephant, his poverty ends. If the elephant kills him, his poverty ends. The most important thing is to go out and hunt. What we stand to gain should be the focus, not what we are at risk of losing.
Of course, there are those of us who have the opposite problem, who take risks without any regard to their own wellbeing. That’s a whole other story for another day.
Today, do something you normally wouldn’t do, will you?
