First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety

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Nope. But if Ben, the family elephant, said it happened, it did. Ben’s sixteen months younger than me and I realize just now that he’s been my ballast over the years with his gruff, Sarah, just don’t worry about it sturdiness. The Mindy to my Mork. When we meet a few weeks later, His Holiness kisses my hand and tosses his sandals aside. We sink into adjacent hotel room lounge chairs. I still don’t have my one question. So I ask the most authentically pressing thing in that exact moment: Inconsistencies in timelines such as (and I'm paraphrasing) 'I haven't owned a car in 5 years' to 'I spent years researching what car to buy and I bought the most environmentally sound car in the world', 'I live in the city' to 'I am a nomad and have lived in 7 different places in the last year'. Huh? I'm lost. On the positive side I loved the name and the concept of 'making the beast beautiful'. A lot of research and therapeutic approaches like positive psychology support this idea of moving from 'diagnosis' to 'compassion and acceptance'. I've found a softening towards myself and in my clients when using this approach. However, what I loved most about this book were the parts where Wilson tried to approach anxiety in a positive way, in other words - make the beast beautiful. And she’s right! For all the negativity that anxiety can bring to our lives, it also makes us the people we are. If you simply removed my anxiety from my personality, I would be a very different person. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t receive treatment or counselling if it is impacting your life in a hugely negative way, but there’s something to be said for how anxiety can be beneficial in some ways. For me, it means that I am extremely efficient and organised; time management is my jam, even if it also turns me into a little bit of a control freak.

This journey is what I do now. I bump along, in fits and starts, on a perpetual path to finding better ways for me and my mate, Anxiety, to get around. It's everything I do.

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This book is a combination of self-help and memoir as TV personality and author, Sarah Wilson relives her own struggles with anxiety. Unfortunately, whilst we share a first name, Sarah and I do not share a large portion of our anxiety and how we manage it. The name dropping was so frustrating. Oprah, Brene Brown, Gabrielle Bernstein etc get to have their names in the book, but then she refers to "some guy" who uses the analogy of walking on custard. His name is Neil Hughes, he has a lovely TED talk and he wrote a book called "Walking on Custard and the meaning of life: a Guide for Anxious Humans". Surely she could have included that? Sarah lives minimally, rides a hand-built bike and is known for travelling the world for eight years with one bag.

The title is derived from a Chinese proverb I came across about twenty years ago in psychiatrist and bipolar sufferer Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir An Unquiet Mind. This book isn't for everybody, but it was 100% for me. It seems people didn't like the meandering structure or the conversational style, which is a-ok, obviously. You do you. But I wanted to write a review because I found the book SO beautiful and helpful, and I was sceptical before buying it, so I wanted to speak directly to my fellow sceptics. The best book on living with anxiety that I’ve ever read, and I have (unfortunately) read many. Sarah is full of expert advice while remaining grounded and incredibly human. Her vulnerability is her strength. And after reading, it will hopefully be yours too.”It's an abyss the 43-year-old has come to know intimately over the last three decades, and one 14 per cent of Australians will be affected by in any 12-month period, making anxiety the most common mental health issue in the country. Not everyone will punch a hole in the wall at work, like Wilson did in an anxious "flip out" in her Masterchef trailer. In this book, Sarah suggests that perhaps anxiety is not something to be gotten rid of or destroyed, but rather something which acts as a personal compass or traffic-light system warning us when we’re acting in a way unaligned with our values. She suggests that if we pay attention and listen to its pleas, our anxiety may be the very thing which brings us closer to finding meaning and fulfilment and in our lives.

This, Wilson says, will lead us to ourselves. "It's like we're searching for a Something Else that makes us feel... what?" she writes. "Like we've landed, I suppose. And that things are all good on this patch."I’ve put an octopus on the cover because they are beasts that have been made more beautiful through our deeper understanding of them. Their intelligence and sentience is hard to fathom. They are driven by 500 million neurons and have a deep desire to connect and communicate with humans. The one on the cover is a Gyotaku print by Damian Oswald. I created an eBook called The Anti-Anxiety Dietusing my learnings from Beast. There’s also a full list of my recipesthat I’ve shared on my blog for meals that help modulate anxiety. Some anxiety resources I recommend Practical and poetic, wise and funny, this is a small book with a big heart. It will encourage the myriad sufferers of the world's most common mental illness to feel not just better about their condition, but delighted by the possibilities it offers for a richer, fuller life. Miss Gee Bees was the teen section of the now defunct Grace Bros. department store behemoth, should you be too young to know. Here’s a full reading listof great anxiety books by mindful types, which I hope many of you will enjoy and find useful.

Despite being full of enough disclaimers and references to cover everyone involved legally, I think this is still a pretty risky read. Wilson’s premise of “my many significant mental health diagnoses all just boil down to anxiety!”, never really defining what “anxiety” is, claiming that maladaptive coping strategies are actually okay (my bulimia helps me manage my anxiety!) and that people are over medicated and should not take medication (except for when they need to, but then stop, and then start again when inevitably have a mental health flare up) is convoluted and misguided at best, and damaging at worst.Thing 2. When you realize there’s no guidebook, an opportunity suddenly presents itself. If no one knows what they’re doing, if there’s no right way to do life, then we can surely choose our own way. Yes? Practical and poetic, wise and funny, this is a small book with a big heart. It will encourage the myriad sufferers of the world’s most common mental illness to feel not just better about their condition, but delighted by the possibilities it offers for a richer, fuller life. You can also get it on Kindle hereand other ebooks hereand for Audio (I read the book myself), you can buy it here. Also, this had just happened. On my second run on the catwalk for the Saturday morning shopping crowd I’d spun in front of the judges. All eyeballs were on me.