Anxiety & Me
I was in the middle of my crisis when I learned that there are five diagnoses of extreme anxiety: general anxiety disorder, social anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic attacks, and phobias. It was a relief to discover that the seemingly random and incomprehensible experiences I had had over the past two months had a name and class. It placed a neat box around something that had previously felt like a wild and uncontrollable monster rampaging around my life. I was having panic attacks.
I became a compulsive oversharer. I was a loaded spring. Everywhere you go people ask you: “How are you doing?” Every time I was asked, my response: “I’ve been dealing with some really bad anxiety lately.”
There was always a reaction and it was quite consistent. The eyes would either dart or focus. Some people’s eyes will dart in deference to the ugliness that has been introduced. Did they hear anxiety as weakness? Pain? Mental illness? Frailty? Immobilization? It can be heard as many things. In any case, the mention of anxiety has been received like a dark shadow on a pitch-black country road, suddenly illuminated by the headlights. On instinct eyes will swerve quickly around the alarming shape that you have introduced, darting uncomfortably away from your face, before coming back to the road and deciding how to proceed. It is not an uncaring skid, just an instinctual one.
Then there are those who will hold their gaze. This is the reaction of a person who has been down this road before. There is no swerve because there is no shock. Usually, their eyes will focus in, will slow and stop. My experience has been that others who have experienced anxiety will usually pause to share something, or to listen to more from you.
It felt like I could not stop myself from these confessions of anxiety. “Be aware of what you share,” my mother would warn kindly, aware of the potential stigma. I would nod. I was aware of what I shared – I shared everything with everyone. I truly did not know how to do otherwise. The anxiety touched all aspects of my life, and to smooth over my state of being with a ‘pretty good’ or ‘you know, same old’ was to remove the possibility of any further honest conversation. It would be too big a lie.
That was not the whole explanation though. In retrospect, I see how my openness was also a kind of challenge. It was affirming to realize that the mere mention of ‘anxiety’ could momentarily stall a conversation. Just the word is loaded enough to gain some tangible reaction from others, whether good or bad. It made me feel like I was not just being weak; that I had a worthy opponent. “YEAH, I JUST SAID ANXIETY,” was in the subtext of my honesty. “WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT? JUST TRY PASSING THAT ONE BY. DO YOU KNOW HOW TO LOOK THAT CRAZY BEAST IN THE EYE?” And then, if they somehow did seem to know, then I could ask the question that really mattered. The subtext of my subtext: “Can you show me how you do that?”
Because the truth is that no matter how honest I have been about my anxiety, no matter how many words I have spouted on this topic, I do not understand it at all. I have only managed to get glimpses of it, like having a few screen shots from a three hour movie. This is the reality that I finally managed to pin down in the writing of this first anxiety post. I have read about anxiety, watched clips about it, heard others’ stories, and thought over my own ongoing experiences many times, but I have yet to see the nature of the beast. I only know that I have been under the influence of something powerful, something that comes both from within me and from around me, and it feels important.
I have had to make peace with a lot of uncommon sense in this journey. I have had to turn some of my old ideas on their head. And unexpectedly, in a time that was entangled in darkness, I have become acutely aware of the beauty and light of the world and of the humans around me. The love and gratitude for the supportive people I have in my life, both those who were directly a part of this anxiety journey and those who weren’t, is enormous. And so, in the series of a few posts, I will try taking a personal perspective on the theme of this blog by unpacking my anxiety experiences. I am not yet sure what is asking to be said, but something is asking. It feels like it is worth making a first clumsy attempt to put it into words.
I think I have a desire to see this ugly dark thing into something beautiful, to realize that what seemed like crap was actually fertilizer for growth and creation. In a way, perhaps, this telling is a love letter to the world, to the ebb and flow and ying and yang of it all that I do not understand but which is the essence of this delicate human life we lead.
Check out the archive here, and send any questions or comments to alex.sproule@gmail.com