Taking a gutsy leap - please be gentle. This is the post I wrote May 4th and promptly deleted. I'm feeling much better now. I'm posting this for anyone and everyone that has ever experienced anxiety. You are not alone.
--Close friends have both been talking about the importance of honesty in the writing of a good blog. That's something I avoid like the plague 'round these parts, instead sharing inane lists of how many miles I plan to run in a month or what financial goals I'm patting myself on the back for lately. Today I will put my pride aside because this needs to be said, even if I'm the only one hearing it.
I have dealt with some form of anxiety for most of my life. I've even joked about my OCD at this blog. Many people refer to their OCD but very few people actually mean it. Watch me try to leave my house four times and you will see what I mean. Someone I love very dearly recently told me, "Clare, you need to stop." I would like to say the issue came up in conversation because this friend is tender and observant. While those qualities do describe the guy in question, anyone with the gift of hearing and eyesight that spends more than ten minutes in my presence will realize that my anxiety and worrisome nature is off the charts. I've been floating through the past year and a half, wringing my metaphorical hands every time I turn a corner. What if, what if, what if.
Make no mistake, I don't want to live like this. Not only is it emotionally exhausting and unhealthy, it's pointless. “Worry is like a rocking chair--it gives you something to do but it doesn't get you anywhere.” But my inner zen self, if she's even in there in the first place, eludes me. I see a glimpse of her jacket as she disappears around street corners. I can't catch up to her. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is reach for my smart phone and quickly open my daily e-mail from the Universe and tiredly cling to its reassurance that trauma doesn't await my loved ones today. That another day will pass and everything will be all right.
This is humiliating to admit but by the end of an average work day in the past few years, I've envisioned countless scenarios of catastrophe. There are constant moments in my work building when the elevator doors can't close or open fast enough, when I run from an imagined gunman (the janitor) or bomb (a clarinet case), when I believe I am literally dying of anaphylactic shock at my desk because today is definitely the first day that I am ever allergic to bananas. The stranger in front of me on my walk home is smoking a cigarette that isn't extinguished properly and it demolishes the entire city, including my house. That twinge near my thigh under my jeans is definitely an angry bee that somehow teleported into my skinny jeans and this is going to end like My Girl. Does it? No. But anxiety is deeply psychological. Little dances in my brain are selling me on the fact that it's not okay and if that isn't bad enough, it won't ever be okay again. Panic. In college I was assaulted by a stranger with a gun in my own yard at night (I fought like hell and got away from him). That's not what started the anxiety, though I'm sure it didn't exactly help. Truthfully, I have been anxious my entire life. Intellectually, I know the constant fears are wildly inaccurate. In hindsight after the fact, most of it is even funny, like when you're having a bad dream and you can't picture anything more scary and when you're awake hours later, you no longer understand how you were gripped with such irrational fear about bears in tutus. When it's happening, helpless and hopeless are the only words that come to mind. Symptoms of anxiety are like a fire drill at full volume in your central nervous system.
I had the rare opportunity to come in two hours late to work last week so I brewed a pot of caramel coffee and cracked open Nearer the Moon, Anais Nin's journals from 1937-1939. I've had my copy since I was a teenager and still love it fiercely. It's one of the very few items that has survived my countless I-never-needed-this! material purges as I've moved between three states and too many houses and apartments. As the years pass, her journals begin to make a little more sense. Then more.
...and then suddenly I have been 28 for a couple of weeks and I stumble upon a quote by her that articulates what haunts me day in and out.
"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."This isn't who I am. It has been rearing its ugly head for too long and I need to change. So I do my laundry, I pack lunches for the week, hand wash the dishes, laugh at an e-mail, stand up all the shampoo bottles in my clawfoot tub after they have fallen over for the fourth time in a day, and breathe. I lecture my closest friends about happiness, telling them it's not something to pursue, that it's RIGHT HERE already. Maybe in the same sense, I need to stop chasing the impossible calm. If I've learned anything about anxiety, it's that there is no magic doorway to get out of the dark place. I have to recreate the room. Hang up a zillion metaphorical Christmas lights and disco balls and tell the darkness to fuck off, one moment at a time.
