Anna Jacobson

If anything in this post raises issues for you, please visit the Victorian Better Health Channel for advice and information about support services.

Anxiety is common, but for some people, excessive and irrational anxiety can interfere with their daily lives. My father was an anxious man, and we grew up with frequent cautions not to tell him anything that might make him worry. In adulthood, I realised that this debilitating anxiety was about losing everything, because by the time he married my show more mother, his entire family was dead and his home had been lost in the Blitz. Even in the stable security and safety of Australia with an award-winning career as a research scientist, he never lost the fear that something terrible would happen to us.

Anna Jacobson's illustrated poetry collection Anxious in a Sweet Store is drawn from her lived experience, and it captures everyday life as an anxious person experiences it. This is the book description from the Upswell website:

Anxious in a Sweet Store is Anna Jacobson’s second illustrated poetry collection where the ‘sweet’, whimsical, humorous, and quirky is juxtaposed with the ‘anxious’ forces of mental illness within the disabling mental health ‘care’ system. Dip into this collection as you please, pick and choose, or devour the whole lot from start to finish. You are invited to take lessons in anxiety, play a French horn, learn how to photograph poets, and haunt a seclusion room in a psychiatric ward. Themes of food, family, dreams, and culture crystallise, while the poet’s mind is fizz bang sherbet on the tongue. Anxious in a Sweet Store is an inventive collection of poems that build and enrich each other across threads of music, anxiety, and observation from a writer who wants her voice heard so others feel less alone in their experiences.

The power of the first poem 'Footprint Gummies' in Part 1: 'Liquorice Allsorts' is that it unpacks the quintessential childhood experience in a way that most of us enjoy as nostalgia: