Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.” -Emma Goldman

Yes, that was a quote from a late nineteenth-century terrorist about how anarchy is great. No, I am not about to try to convince people to start throwing Molotov cocktails into Walmarts.

What I would really like to do is talk about anxiety. People tend to throw around this term a lot nowadays, so let me briefly clarify what I mean when I use that term. Anxiety is the unpleasant feeling of dread over anticipated events, generally out of one’s control.

Everyone feels some degree of anxiety during their life, and almost everyone reacts to it differently. Some people actually have an anxiety disorder that requires medical treatment, while some may experience severe anxiety for an acute period of their life, and still others might simply have sporadic moments of anxiety throughout their lives.

Regardless of what one’s individual experience with anxiety may be, I think I can confidently say that the worst thing about anxiety, for me at least, is the spiral. We have all been there: you get a bad grade on a test. It may not even be very important, especially in the grand scheme of things; but regardless, it rattles you. You cannot stop thinking about it, and all of a sudden your imagination runs away with you. You begin to wonder: “What if I get a bad grade in this class? What are my parents going to say? Did I get a bad grade because I’m dumb?” And boom, it bothers you all day. The worse thing is, when you are in a state of existential worry like this, it actually makes you perform more poorly in other aspects of your life by distracting you and making you focus on your failures.

I believe that, while a simply unrealistic political goal, anarchy is good for the soul. Ok, ok, I know that was dramatic, but hear me out. Anarchy is the idea that no person has the right to tell another person what to do. Period. When edgy college professors need to get published and write fancy, pseudo-intellectual treatises on things like “anarcho-syndicalism”, they are just beating around the proverbial bush. Anarchy is the idea that I am smart enough to figure out what I should do with myself and my time. That is it. When I experience a period of anxiety, it is almost always because I feel like I have let someone down. Getting a bad grade, getting chewed out at work, or performing poorly in athletics, these are all instances of failing expectations.

Sometimes, other people’s expectations are necessary to push somebody to their full potential, and, regardless of how you feel about expectations in general, we live in a world that does not allow us to decide whether or not we want to follow the rules. It’s when we lose ourselves in these rules, or begin to define ourselves by our meeting/failing of expectations, that we begin to truly suffer from anxiety.

So what do we do? How do we live in this world of expectations without sacrificing ourselves to anxiety? The solution I offer is this: next time you are in the bathroom in the library, and you have been panic-studying for eight hours because you cannot afford to do poorly on this test because then you might get a bad grade in the class and then you won’t go to grad school and it might mean you’re lazy or dumb and your parents might be disappointed and- Just stop. Wash your hands (you did just go to the bathroom, you filthy animal) and go to the towel dispenser. See that picture on it? The one that no one ever looks at; the one that shows a picture of someone pulling the towel down from the middle with one hand? It’s the picture that is circled and crossed out? And next to it, that other picture of someone pulling the towel out with both hands, and that picture is just circled? Remember that? Yeah.

Pull that towel out with one hand. Look at that rule; that tiny, small, inconsequential rule, and break it for no other reason than to establish that you are a real thing that matters, and that rule is not a real thing. The only real thing about rules is the reality you give it when it aligns with one of your personal values. It is you that gives rules their power, and its is you that takes it away when you decide they are not worth following.  It’s just someone’s opinion about something that got written down. Now, please do not all go do terrible things like drink and drive or cut people in line in the caf during Chapel break, and tell everyone that the Weekly said to. But the next time you are falling into the spiral of anxiety, commit a little act of anarchy. Break a rule, and watch what happens to you. Usually, you will be fine, and the same is true of whatever situation in making you anxious. You will be fine.