How to Write Anxiety- Use Repetition

It’s mental health month! As writers, we tend to portray mental illness, and one way I use to write anxiety is by repeating an idea. Why does that work? Let me explain with an example from my very first poetry book, which talks about experiences with mental illness. It’s the story of Siya told in the form of poems. I also have a novel which is the tale of Siya’s life where she goes through therapy.

Now, writing about mental illness needs to be done with sensitivity.  Hello Future Me has a great video on writing mental health in fiction. Please use trigger warnings when writing anxiety, please do not romanticize or villainize mental illness, but if you’re writing anxiety, I feel repetition is a very good technique because anxiety, in my experience, is just the same thought being repeated in your head again and again till it becomes a spiral that you go down to till you cannot rationally think your way out of that. In Hindi, we have the word charkraview and that’s what I want to use when describing anxiety.

I am going to use the poem “A Session with My Therapist” from Diary of a Twenty-Something: A Collection of Teenage Musings to show how repetition can help portray anxiety.

Trigger warnings for this piece are the portrayal of anxiety, so please, if this kind of content disturbs you or makes you uncomfortable, you do not have to engage with it. Let’s go on with the writing side of things now.

One thing I use is a lot of italics in my writing. I use it to show the internal thought process of the character or the overthinking thoughts compared to what they are conveying. So this poem starts with

“Anxiety isn’t always rocking back and forth

Sometimes it’s driving your mind wild and questioning everything under the sun, everything in your life you know to be certain, and yet

Do they love me?

Do I love them?

Are they right for me?

Maybe I should leave them, but I don’t want to or do I?

 You just accept the need to never question friends, and yet you question teachings.

 What if I like them as more than?

Selfish.

Manipulative.

Am I on the right career? Does it even matter? Am I destined to be a failure?

 I can’t breathe; wait I can.

Attention seeking.

Screaming, crying.

I need the pills. Do I?

Does knowing its true make it worse?

Am I wasting my life away?”

And then I repeat this part with anxiety again, in bold, where I say, “Someone get me those goddamn pills“, and then there is a part again which goes “Am I wasting their time like I’m wasting mine? Am I even worth it? Useless, hurting everyone, seeking attention. Manipulative.“

So you see, there’s not the repetition of the same sentence again and again, it’s not repetition in the traditional way, it’s the repetition of ideas, and poetry usually has that, but what it does is it creates a sense, especially when using italics as a visual aid, it creates a sense of distorted reality between what’s actually happening versus what the character is thinking.

So that questioning comes up again and again, “Do I even have it? Do I even need those pills?”

That repetition of that idea, repetition of that questioning, the repetition of the negative self-thought about the character shows how strongly the character is feeling those thoughts, and it can show anxiety, so this is how I use repetition to convey anxiety.

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