ANXIETY

"Anxiety- got me on the run/Anxiety- yeah, I just need someone/ Anxiety- can't get nothin' done/ Anxiety- spoils all the fun" - Pat Benatar, Anxiety (Get Nervous).

    Ever since I can remember (a long time surprisingly), I've walked alongside of anxiety. I haven't called it anxiety forever, because way back when, it wasn't commonly called that. There were other names or other ways of talking about people who were frequently anxious. For example, I grew up being told I was a "worrier" and that I "worry too much". And nobody was wrong about either of those things. I was a worrier, worrying about multiple topics at a dizzying speed, from a very early age.     

    I still sometimes have flashbacks to 6, or 8 or 11 year old me, laying in bed, trying to fall asleep but not being able to before navigating a series of troubling thoughts. The thoughts ranged from banal topics like, "Oh no, my library book is overdue, am I going to get in big trouble for that?" to not-so-banal topics like "What happens when we die? Do we just stop existing forever? And how long is forever?" Looking back now, I am amazed that the child me was even able to sleep at all after playing some of the more  harrowing scripts in my little mind. 

    The anxiety didn't leave me once I hit adolescence either of course. No, it stayed with me, tagging along as I navigated teen friendships and intimate relationships, and school pressures, and my changing body. It hung around, whispering in my ear all of the things that could go wrong, or that were already wrong with me, or with my life. Its favorite thing to whisper was "What if...". Those 2 words would then be followed by other words, words that were capable of instantly breaking my spirit. "What if he doesn't like me back?" "What if they don't include me?" "What if I fail the math test?" "What if they think I'm ugly, or fat, or boring, or not cool?" Anxiety was constantly by my side, but hardly my friend.

    By early adulthood, anxiety was so much a part of me that I often struggled to know who I was apart from it. Around that time, a new companion, depression, crept into my life and set up camp. The two of them showed no mercy, bombarding me with awful thoughts and feelings on a regular basis. I started devouring self-help books in a frantic attempt to fend them off. I figured I was doing it all wrong, that I should be doing something to help myself, that the problems were all mine, that I had created them and so I could fix them. And sometimes this worked. Sometimes, my anxious and depressed companions would fade into the background. But this was always temporary- a few days, weeks or rarely, months- and they would always return, grabbing both of my hands with a vengeance. It didn't matter where I lived, they followed me. For years, my adulthood was spent moving or traveling to different places, or changing apartments in an attempt to "start over", in the hope that the old me, the worrier and depressed me would disappear. 

    In my late 30s, and with the help of a therapist, I began to see that the depression that had brought me to the therapist in the first place was really just exhaustion from being anxious all the time. My mind and heart had finally surrendered and a strange hopelessness and fatigue with life set in. I understood that the anxiety had become stronger than I was, knocking me over more days than not. But I also understood that I was letting this happen. I was letting it define and defeat me. We began to talk in therapy about recognizing the anxiety but knowing that it didn't have to incapacitate me. I started reading about "Acceptance and Commitment Therapy", and I started to look at my anxious sidekick differently. I also started to understand that the anxiety was never going to leave my side as long as I lived, and so I was going to have to learn how to deal with it.This was a big revelation for me, and a turning point. In retrospect, however, although I began to understand all of this, it would take over another 10 years for me to live this truth fully. 

    One of the ways I had dealt with the anxiety, since the age of 18 really, was with alcohol. I never used alcohol regularly, as in, never daily, but I did use it most times when socializing. In my 40s, newly split from my partner and raising my son alone half the time, I socialized more, therefore drank more. I started to have a new routine of sometimes stopping by the liquor store on the way home from a lounge visit with friends to buy a bottle of wine just to keep the buzz going. I would then suck back a few more glasses while phoning people; this meant I wasn't drinking alone. The alcohol was the one thing that could quiet the anxiety beast at my side. The anxious thoughts would diminish and a calm would overtake me; it didn't matter that it was an artificial calm. It worked and that's all that mattered. The problem is it worked to induce a calm state but there were just too many negative consequences for me to choose that as my main coping mechanism. So I decided to quit.

    These days, my main way to cope is to meditate, bombard myself with uplifting self-talk when I need it, and to exercise. As corny as it may sound, I hold hands with my anxiety more often than not now. I meet her where she needs to be met, let her have her say, but then I do my own thing. I understand her fears, her vulnerabilities, her raw, sore spots. I'm okay that she walks alongside me. But she isn't me. She never was, even though sometimes I struggled to see that. I now know that there is a me apart from the anxiety, a bigger me, a healthier me, a wiser one. And I can sometimes even look at the anxiety now as my companion, rather than my enemy. In the spirit of observation and compassion that meditation has taught me, I can say, "Oh there you are again. What is it you would like to say to me today?" I can listen, but not be defeated by it. We just walk together, side by side, my anxiety and I.