(courtesy Echo publishing)
When you are consumed by anxiety, the kind that eats you alive in endlessly exhausting ways and turns even the simplest of moments into existential hell, can there even be room for love?
That’s the question that consumes lifelong friends Kelly O’Mara and Finn aka Finely Walsh,protagonists of Guy Sigley‘s Anxious Hearts, who became best friends at the age of 11 and who have been each other’s best friend and go-to point of support ever since.
Both Kelly, who’s aiming to be the most successful, high-achieving paediatrician ever, and Finn, who’s on the cusp of heartthrob-heavy stardom as a major international Netflix movie beckons, are battling with some fairly intense inner demons which won’t let them alone and leave little room for much else.
Kelly is funnelling her explosive intent into her paediatric studies, her singular sense of purpose and drive leaving little room for romance, fun or anything remotely resembling a social life, and leaving her always on the edge of a pressure valve releasing moment which could ruin everything.
Hers is a world with little give, and even less forgiveness and her only place of safety and escape is with Finn who lets her stay over whenever she wants, who listens with complaint and who understands what it is to feel overwhelmed with life as your daily default.
While Finn looks every inch the successful actor, a man who enters a whole other zone when he acts which allows no room for the crippling, catastrophising anxiety which often cripples him, he’s plagued by self doubt and a gnawing sense that one false move will bring his existential house of cards crashing volubly down upon him.
She stared at Finn, took a deep breath, and sighed loudly. ‘Well, look at us,’ she said. ‘A right pair of complete fucking disasters.’
This sense of impending doom colours every inch of his waking moments, turning ordinary changes of traffic lights into destiny wielding inflection points full of potential or actual disaster – the two are indistinguishable for a man who has suffered great trauma and has never really come to grips with it – or moments of intimacy into portentous turning points that will likely ruin everything.
It’s a hell of a way to live, and not in the jocular, devil-may-care fashion, and it means that the outwardly successfully star of TV, and maybe the big streaming screen too, can’t really enjoy his ever more successful life in any of the ways most people would.
Whole romance has put its head above the parapet between the two friends, it’s now a no-go zone for the two, most especially for Kelly who can’t conceive of two broken people being able to make any kind of cohesive, nurturing whole.
The thing is pretty much everyone around them sees or suspects that they are each other’s one and only, not simply adorned with tattoos which acknowledge and celebrate that both their names mean “warrior” in Celtic but there for each other in a way that only two people who have travelled similarly anxious roads can be.
Their friendship is their lifeline but as Anxious Hearts progresses in ways movingly intense and empathetically honest, it seems that it might also be doing them harm too.
Or is it?
(courtesy official author Insta)
That’s what Sigley captures so beautifully in this arrestingly good novel of raw humanity and down in the trenches authentic friendship.
What Kelly and Finn can’t see, again Kelly most emphatically, is that they are each other’s source of strength and hope and that while they may be broken, at least as far as a super successful world that brooks no tolerance of flaws or fractured humanity (god forbid you should be less than perfect!), that that is precisely what makes them so meaningful to each other.
Filled with empathic compassion and an aching sense of lived experience, Anxious Hearts is a heartrending but relatable exploration of what it means to want the whole world but to not be able to fully grasp what your given when it comes your way.
Your mind tells you, when you’re anxious, that there’s something wrong with the sorts of things most people would simply take on face value, and you can spend much of your time trying to sort fact from fiction in an internal emotional and mental landscape that washing machines things so intensely and endlessly that getting a real, measured view of the world and people and life can feel all but impossible.
Sigley captures this so beautifully, and if you’re someone who struggles with anxiety, like this reviewer, you will readily identify with what Finn and Kelly are grappling with, heightened for dramatic storytelling purposes it may be (though, to be fair, not by much).
Kelly drew her knees to her chest and let her tears flow until they became sobs that racked her body and then damp stains on the cushion where she lay her head to rest, hoping to make it all go away, at least for a little while.
What he communicates so well is that we can often became our own worst enemy.
We can become so blinded by anxiety and pressure and the potential for losing catastrophically what we long for so much that we end up sabotaging ourselves, not by design obviously – Kelly and Finn are aiming to stand astride the world, not be crushed by it – and drop the very thing we want more than anything.
The big question posed with real love and understanding in Anxious Hearts is that in maybe losing what we think we want that perhaps we are opening a pathway to what we really need?
It’s hard to see at time when anxiety has you seeing up as down and down as up etc, but as Finn and Kelly discover on their journey to beginning to come to grips with the impossible standards the modern world sets and that they have adopted for themselves, and to find a place of peace and calm to call their home, and hopefully, maybe, possibly with each other, there is a way forward even in the chaos of mental health upheavals.
If you have ever struggled to see a way out of the morass of anxiety and pain or the overwhelming crush of impossible expectations, you will find a lot with which to identify in Anxious Hearts but even more than that, you will two people who know each other intimately, who need each other desperately and who may be exactly what the other needs, all evidence in a soul-consuming dog-eat-dog world to the contrary.