The thousand little branches of anxiety
Writing, setting boundaries and talking to herself have all helped Jennifer Nuesi rein in the anxiety that has plagued her since childhood
Jennifer Nuesi believes some people are “just born with anxiety” and she is one of them. Every report card she ever brought home as a child had a note that read: “Jennifer is doing great…but she seems very, very anxious.” In school, where friends saw her as outgoing, funny and energetic, she was actually nervously trying to cover up how apprehensive she was by acting as the class clown or extrovert.
While nature may have provided the foundation for her anxiety, her environment exacerbated it. Raised by a single mother, the only child of parents from the Dominican Republic, she felt all the pressures of a first generation American growing up in an Hispanic family.
“In my family, there was a lot of criticism: ‘You need to look like this. You need to be like this,’” says Nuesi, 34, who lives in Northport, Florida with her 10-year-old daughter, Cairo. “If you’re not a doctor or an engineer, you’re not going places. So it’s a lot of pressure. I feel like in our Hispanic culture, your parents birthed you, so you owe them for life. And that’s a debt no one can pay.”
Her well-meaning single mother’s extreme protectiveness and continual criticism led Nuesi to second guess herself constantly. And that led to a persistent internal anger “because I felt like I had no control over my life because of the anxiety constantly talking in my ear.” When she tried to express her fears and feelings of concern about her mental state, her family, which only recognized mental illness as the stereotypical “crazy person” on the street, simply made jokes or told her she needed to find her faith.
“It was like, ‘You’ve just got to get to Jesus and once you get to Jesus you’ll be fine,” Nuesi recalls. “People don’t realize that when someone has a mental condition, prayers alone aren’t going to help, regardless of your dogma. And on top of that, just being a teenager. I mean, who is comfortable in their skin as a teenager? All these different elements coming together created the perfect storm for me as I was growing up.”
Nuesi found some relief in burying herself in books; the library became her home away from home.
“I would just dive into reading and books,” she recalls. “The library was my sanctuary. I had a hard time getting rides, so I’d just say, ‘Leave me here’ and I’d be at the library for hours with my stack of books. Finding that outlet or escape from my mind was my solace.”
At 14, Nuesi, with help from her teachers and school counselors, finally convinced her mother to take her to a therapist. There she received a diagnosis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Dysthmic Disorder, a form of chronic depression. She and her mother went to a few sessions together, but didn’t continue “because my family didn’t want to take that journey.” But she felt some relief at just understanding what her condition was and continued to learn about it on her own.
Her parents had moved from New York to Florida when she was in high school, but after graduating she chose to return to the East Coast, attending college at Johnson and Wales in Rhode Island, where she majored in event management and also began making her first forays into writing. The therapist she’d seen had suggested she keep a diary, but that format never worked for Nuesi. At the time, Facebook was just coming to the fore, so instead she began writing a “quote a day” on the social media platform.
“That’s where my creative juices would really flow,” she says. “These tons of little quote evolved into reading and writing poetry. I was able to kind of mull together the feelings I was having that I couldn’t say out loud. I felt like when I could put pen to paper, I was able to silence the anger and the anxiety and just write from the heart. That page, that pen was my therapist. That’s where I was able to slowly shift things in my life to a different direction.”
She was drawn to event management because it was also creative and provided an opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives. Yet after graduation, she moved back to New York and briefly turned to acting and modeling instead. She also started a blog on Tumbler. But with the birth of her daughter she felt the need to get a “real” job.
Nuesi moved to Florida and began to work her way up in the ladder in the corporate world of event management. Mostly this involved administrative work that included long hours, endless details and lots of pressure. When the Covid pandemic hit, she was one of the only people left working in the office, doing double time to cover the bases for everyone who was gone.
“I feel like my last 10 years of work have been just an anxiety riot,” Nuesi says. “Every time I would get a call it was like my heart was in my throat and I’m thinking about 10 million different things. And I was constantly second guessing myself. You question everything when they’re questioning you and then you’re questioning why they’re questioning you. I was just anxiety driven.”
She was working long hours and “hitting marks that excelled over what anyone else did” but her managers were still applying pressure and undermining her confidence.
“When you have anxiety you’re always second guessing yourself anyway, so having that in myself and having literal evidence of what I’ve accomplished and for someone to question what I was doing or to expect even more from me when I was going above and beyond…” she begins. “I could tolerate it in myself but I couldn’t tolerate with someone else. So that for me was the breaking point.”
But when that breaking point came, it didn’t result in her “flipping out,” Nuesi recalls.
“It was calm,” she says. “It was like, ‘I’m done. I don’t want to feel this way anymore and I don’t want to be in space where I don’t want to be anymore. I’m going to do what makes me happy and focus on my passions and making sure I’m living the best life possible.’”
She gave herself six months to “save up,” as well as gear up her “side hustle” -- selling vintage clothing on the Internet. Then she took the almost 700 pieces of poems she’d written that had “never seen the light of day” and began to turn them into the book she’d long imagined.
“I just geared up,” she says. “I don’t think I would ever do that again because for sure, it was crazy stressful. The anxiety of ‘I’ve gotta get this done,’ the anxiety of ‘what if I fail?’ I wouldn’t recommend it. But I definitely prepared myself and got ready.”
She knew just what she wanted to create -- a book that highlighted anxiety and captured its essence in both poetry and visual design. To that end, her book -- “Things: A Visual Poetry Collection of Anxiety” -- has no page numbers “because pages equal organization and with anxiety there is no organization, no rhyme or reason,” nor any chronological narrative.
“We’re used to seeing anxiety as a moment, and it’s not a moment,” Nuesi says. “It something that is a continuous struggle every single day, with every single event. The things that made you anxious last week are still coming into this week. So I really wanted to showcase through poetry all the things we’re used to in poetry -- depression, heartache, love, loss, growth rebirth -- but all under the umbrella of anxiety.”
Graphic designs, with an emphasis on geometric shapes in black and white, attempt to capture “how anxiety feels,” so even if readers can’t connect with the literary in the book, they can access a sense of the inner apprehension anxiety can produce. The book is also atypically structured in that the prose involves repetitions and reversals.
“There are four sections or chapters…and in between the sections you see a lot of repetition,” she explains. “So you’re like, ‘Wait a minute…Didn’t they go forward? Why are we moving three steps back?’ Well, that because that’s how anxiety is. You’re on this journey to growth.”
Nuesi self-published the book in 2021. Not only is it deeply personal, but it was deeply therapeutic. Creating it helped her recognize her “toxic” traits and learn to focus on “how not to listen so much to my anxious voice, but listen more to my inner voice.” In fact, her “No. 1 coping skill” at this point is to actually speak in both voices out loud and then use her inner voice to counter and question the veracity of her anxious voice.
“Does it look normal to other people? Probably not,” she admits. “But it’s for me so while I used to be shy about it, now I’m just like, ‘I’m going to do what I have to do to be better.’ My mental health is my responsibility, not anyone else’s.”
Part of that responsibility also lies in setting boundaries with others. She is open and explicit about expressing her needs and limitations and she’s not afraid to “cut someone off” who isn’t conducive to her mental well being. She also models that example of setting boundaries yet still being open and honest in her communication with her daughter, and soliciting her feedback rather than criticizing or clamping down.
“For example, when I was growing up, a lot of anxiety would be about my clothes,” she remembers. “I’d pick out clothes and my Mom would say, ‘That is ugly,’ or ‘That doesn’t go together.’ And if she would give me something nice to wear, I was terrified that I’d get chewed out if I got one speck of dirt on it. So with my little one, I’m just like, ‘OK, these are your clothes. I want you to take care of them, but if you get them dirty, that’s OK. That’s what clothes are for, we can wash them.”
Knowing mental health challenges can be in part genetic, she has recognized some anxiety in her daughter, “though she’s not as bad as when I was that age.” When she sees a sign of anxiety, she gives immediate reassurance and asks her daughter to share her own feelings.
“In my house, I don’t punish her for whatever she does, we talk about it -- and there are consequences of course,” she says. “We’ve been doing that since she was about 7 and she’s way more able to tell me what’s going on with her than I ever was.”
Next Nuesi hopes to create a workbook to accompany her poetry book that will allow others to use their creativity and expression to process their own anxiety. She’s also creating a line of candles and mugs and is dabbling with the idea of the emerging field of poetry NFTs (non-fungible transfers), cryptographic tokens that are linked to digital (and sometimes physical) content providing proof of ownership. Her biggest goal, however is “just to get this book in as many hands as possible, because I wish there had been a book like this when I was growing up.”
“Again, the way anxiety is portrayed is like moment to moment,” she says. “And it’s not really like that. A moment happens, and because of this moment, anxiety splits off into a thousand little branches and you don’t know when you’re going to bump into it again.”
Nuesi stresses the importance for anyone who suffers from anxiety to ask for clarity and to set firm boundaries -- clarity to avoid the ambiguousness that can trigger anxiety (“What do you mean we’ll see what happens?”) and boundaries to insure they don’t give themselves away in an effort to cover every possible outcome their anxious mind projects.
“I think everyone is too consumed with making other people happy and they forget about themselves,” Nuesi says. “You’ve seen them, the people pleasers, the compliment givers, the overachievers, those that always go above and beyond. People say, ‘That’s a great worker.’ No, that’s a person covered in anxiety.”
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