Joe explains why excitement specifically gets repressed into anxiety: fully felt, excitement dissolves a bit of you. The self you defend becomes less solid.
“If you really allow a feeling of excitement, there’s less of you. Your identity starts to crack. … the identity becomes more spacious, less something that has to be defended.”
This is the hidden reason anxiety feels safer than excitement. Anxiety keeps the self busy, braced, and intact—doing the to-do list, scanning for the other shoe to drop. Excitement does the opposite; it opens the self up and loosens its grip on a fixed identity. For someone who has organized their life around control and self-reliance, that loosening can feel like a threat, so the system kinks the excitement into anxiety to keep the identity defended.
The freedom is to let the identity be spacious rather than guarded—to allow the excitement, and the slight dissolution of self that comes with it, instead of converting it into something to manage.
Related Concepts
- Joy dissolves identity and that’s what makes it scary
- Anxiety is often repressed excitement
- Saying “I’m excited” while feeling it can unkink anxiety
- Anxiety is sometimes excitement that isn’t being felt all the way
- Not being yourself creates a constant, everlasting anxiety
- Breathing into anxiety to enjoy it turns it into excitement