The Anxious Idiot

I thought this was an interesting post from the New York Opinionator, written by someone with medicated anxiety. (I don't have an anxiety problem (I may have an exasperated over-reaction against it actually), but it lurks in the extended ancestry, so could be the line I walk closest to. Who knows.) Here is a closing paragraph. We've all got bad patterns of thought, no matter which way they run, and here we get accused of plain laziness for succumbing to them, but it is worth reading:

To accomplish this, however, he has to work, and work hard. He has to fight — every day of his life, if he’s got it bad — to build new patterns of thought, so that his mind doesn’t fall into the old set of grooves. He has to dig new tracks and keep digging.

... So long as he remains dogged. Anything else, as my brother might say, is idiocy.