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Dear Anxiety || Spoken Word

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A poet spends thirty years fighting a war nobody could see, and then puts the whole thing into four minutes of verse.

Clayton Jennings built his name as an evangelist and spoken-word performer, but “Dear Anxiety” is the piece that strips the persona away. Released in June 2018 as part of his album Goodbye Religion, the poem is written as a direct letter to anxiety itself, addressed like an enemy rather than a diagnosis. Jennings doesn’t perform detachment here — he names the panic attacks, the night terrors, and the cold sweats by date and decade, then turns the piece into a public reckoning with a private fight.

• Jennings says his first panic attack hit at age ten, launching a struggle he kept silent for decades.
• He describes night terrors, waking in cold sweats, and a lingering fear that God was keeping score of his sins.
• The piece frames thirty years of torment ending in what Jennings calls freedom found through his Christian faith.

The Letter as Confrontation

The epistolary structure is the piece’s central move: anxiety is written to, not written about. That choice matters because it converts a clinical-sounding word into a character Jennings can accuse, rebuke, and ultimately dismiss. He spends the opening lines cataloging what the condition did to his body and his sleep, then pivots hard into direct address — telling anxiety, essentially, that its lease is up.

That pivot from vulnerability to defiance is where the piece gets its charge. Jennings doesn’t soften the early details to make the ending land easier; he lets the panic attacks and the sweat-soaked nights sit in full detail before he turns and confronts them. It’s a structure that mirrors how a lot of listeners describe living with anxiety day to day — the dread first, the fight only after.

Three Decades of Silence

Jennings is specific about the timeline. A first panic attack at ten years old, then decades of managing it alone while building a public ministry career — the kind of split that a lot of performers and public figures describe but rarely detail on stage. He talks about maintaining a persona for audiences while privately carrying suicidal ideation and depression, the distance between the version of himself people applauded and the version trying to survive the night.

After thirty years of torment, Jennings says he found freedom — not through managing anxiety, but through what he describes as a personal Savior taking it from him entirely.

That claim is the theological hinge of the piece. Where a lot of mental-health conversations, including the ones covered in discussions of what actually drives depression and anxiety, focus on causes and coping mechanisms, Jennings frames his resolution strictly through faith — anxiety as spiritual oppression to be rebuked, not just a condition to be managed.

Rebuke Over Resignation

The back half of “Dear Anxiety” shifts register entirely. Jennings moves from recounting symptoms to directly rebuking what he calls demonic oppression and the lies anxiety told him about his worth and his standing with God. It’s a performance choice as much as a theological one — the voice gets sharper, the lines shorter, the tone closer to a sermon than a confession.

That defiance is consistent with the broader intent behind Goodbye Religion as a project: less about polished doctrine, more about naming the gap between the faith people perform publicly and the fear they carry privately. Listeners working through similar territory outside a strictly religious frame can find overlapping ground in resources on breaking cycles of excessive worry, even where the piece’s own answer is explicitly spiritual rather than clinical.

The Significance of Format

Spoken word gives Jennings a structure that straight testimony doesn’t: repetition, direct address, and a controlled build toward a single declarative ending. “Dear Anxiety” uses all three — the letter format lets him return to the same accusations across the piece, tightening the noose before the final rebuke lands. It’s a technique built for performance, not just reading, which is part of why the video version carries more weight than the words alone.

Jennings released the piece as one part of a full album, so “Dear Anxiety” functions as a single chapter in a larger project rather than a standalone statement. Anyone following Goodbye Religion track by track will hear this poem sitting alongside the rest of his catalog addressing doubt, public image, and faith — the same tension between private struggle and public ministry that runs through his other spoken-word work from that release.