Author David A. Robertson.Supplied
For most of his 48 years, David A. Robertson has struggled, often severely, with that mental-health plague of our times: anxiety. The author of more than 25 books has worked the condition into a number of his works, which include an autofictional adult novel, The Theory of Crows; a memoir about his relationship with his father, Black Water; and the young-adult graphic-novel series The Reckoner, whose Indigenous hero-protagonist confronts supernatural beings alongside his own mental-health challenges.
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After years of dealing with the subject elliptically through art, however, Robertson felt the need to address it head-on. In All the Little Monsters, he details his continuing journey with a host of anxiety-intertwined afflictions, including depression, panic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. He also shares the strategies that have helped reduce anxiety to the status of an uninvited but persistent bedfellow – one that no longer completely controls his life.
Robertson spoke to The Globe from Winnipeg, where he lives.
Your book’s subtitle is, ‘How I Learned to Live with Anxiety.’ What’s changed in how you handle anxiety?
I just went through four months of pretty awful anxiety. I was supposed to go to Germany in September for the Berlin writers’ festival, and a couple of hours before I was supposed to go to the airport I felt this rising fear and panic in my body. My heart started to pound and skip. I felt a cold sweat, really unsteady. My mind started to race. I knew that if I went there, I might not come back.
That was my mind telling me: You need to take a rest. If that happened 15 years ago, I would have been out for months.
I didn’t make it to Berlin, but I did make it to Toronto, where I was scheduled to go right after. And because I’ve been able to accrue this tool box of different techniques and interventions for my mental health, I was able to recover a lot quicker. But I’ve still lost 25 pounds since September.
The book opens with you taking the stage at a literary festival in 2019, even as you feel the beginnings of a full-blown panic attack coming on. Why did you decide to go up there, when you could easily have turned back?
That was a really important night because I was on a mental-health panel, ironically. And I love public speaking. It calms me. [Fellow panelists] Alicia Elliott, Shelagh Rogers and Sarah Leavitt were great looking after me in the green room before the event. They told me I didn’t have to go on.
But I felt I needed to, because that’s what the night was about. Shelagh turned to me first, I think intentionally, and asked how mental-health issues had affected my life. Shelagh is a great friend of mine, and she knows what I’ve been living with. So I just told everybody that I was having a panic attack.
That brought the crowd into our community. It also showed people that you don’t always know what someone else is going through. It was a really propulsive moment that eventually led to me writing this book.
You dive pretty deeply into perceived causes, in childhood and elsewhere, of your anxiety. Were you concerned about the effect of revisiting those events?
The hardest moment for me to write about was my father’s death. I’d never really shared much about the day he died and what that was like. It was really hard reliving the moment I found out in the hot springs in Banff and having a breakdown in front of a couple hundred people. And that I couldn’t get it together, go to the airport and go home for my mom and my brothers.
Writing about suicidal ideation in the year after my dad’s death was hard to write about too.
Even though I’ve been living with this for a long time, there’s a bit of – I don’t know if it’s shame – but there’s a thing in the back of your head that maybe it’s a weakness you don’t want to show people. But I was very close to wanting to end my life, so I think it was important for me to talk about how I was able to avoid that and, through doing healthy things, help myself figure out how to live again.
Your anxieties are rooted in fears around mortality and health. Given that most of us are afraid of dying, and that you’ve had a series of heart problems, those fears don’t seem entirely irrational. Do global issues – politics or climate change, say – ever act as triggers as well?
I do a lot of advocacy on environmental protection, climate change and land stewardship. But that’s not the source of my anxiety in terms of mental-health struggles.
Anxiety is actually a very important thing to experience. The fight-or-flight thing is ingrained in us. But when it gets out of control, that’s when it becomes dangerous and destructive. I’m afraid of things that are happening in the world today, but the irrational fear in me is about more intimate and personal things.
For instance, I had my gallbladder out last February. I’d been having stomach problems for years, but a lot of that was triggered by anxiety. And because I’m always trying to figure out when to listen to my mind and when not to, when I woke up feeling this awful pain in my stomach, I thought: This is just my anxiety.
Six, seven hours later, I was still having pain. So I went to the hospital and they were like, your gallbladder’s dead. You wouldn’t have been able to go on much longer with it the way it was because it was blocked off entirely.
But did making that call relatively late undermine your confidence in terms of listening – literally and figuratively – to your gut?
I think it was actually a good lesson for me. Because I felt like, I need to probably give this a bit because I don’t know if this is my anxiety or not.
This arrhythmia I have, on some days it can be really bad. But there’s nothing they can do in the hospital, so I just have to calm myself. I’ll do some deep breathing, some self-talk. And by the end of the day, I’m still alive.
You write that your brain will sometimes scream “an alternate form of reality” about health-related stuff. Isn’t that also what you’re doing as a storyteller, albeit in a more productive way?
Every book’s a portal in a way. It gives you this ability to live in another world and in somebody else’s shoes for a period of time. Anxiety also presents you with a different reality. And oftentimes it’s the worst possible reality that could happen for you.
When you write a story, you can trick your brain into feeling like that stuff has really happened. That’s why in The Theory of Crows I wrote about taking my dad to the trapline and spreading his ashes – because I wanted to take him there. By writing about it, I felt like I had.
You write definitively, “I will always have anxiety.” With your heart ailment, though, you write that “it may always be there.” Why are you so sure about one and not the other?
Well for my heart there is a definitive cure – an electrophysiology study and catheter ablation – that’s gonna be 96 per cent effective. That’s A plus for academics, right?
But in my experience with anxiety and mental-health afflictions, there’s no cure like that. There’s medicine you can take that will numb it. There’s medicine that will do some physiological work in your brain. But there’s no cure – that I know of – for the stuff I’m living with. There’s no cure for obsessive compulsive disorder, which is closely tied to health anxiety. There’s no ablation. You can’t burn it off and fix it.
I’ve lived with it for probably the better part of 30 years now. And I can fight against it or accept it. Fighting against it is exhausting. Accepting it is still hard to live with it. But accepting it as a part of who you are, I think makes you stronger.
