It was a beautiful November day - crisp, bright skies, the trees still full of Autumn colours, just the right amount of warmth in the sunlight and cool in the shade, a day to gladden the heart - but I was feeling low. Low and anxious for various reasons, one of which was the fact that I'd been in a full-on collision with an e-scooter a couple of days before, and was nursing my wounds. I just couldn't shake the feeling at all. It is, actually, a chronic feature of my life: sometimes fully in my face, sometimes gently rumbling in the background, but always there. At times, it makes me feel hugely inadequate, that I am just simply not enough. It is the little sibling of depression, but it can be just as debilitating. This is my own experience of it, and what I feel it does to me.
Anxiety is:
- distorting
- pervasive
- self-perpetuating
- exhausting
- isolating
- paralyzing
- deceptive
Anxiety is distorting
When you are feeling anxious, you see the world through a warped lens. Negatives are magnified, and positives diminished. Certain constant refrains appear - one of mine, in common with a lot of others, is that I am inadequate and useless, and that I can never do enough. Things other people say or do are misinterpreted or exaggerated by anxiety, and that can be enough to drive the engine of misery on further. And because anxiety is isolating, instead of asking another person honestly what they actually meant, it ends up with one making entirely false hypotheses of what was actually meant.
Anxiety is pervasive
It spreads entirely across one's mental horizons, leaving no room for a clear view. It seeps into every action and every thought. I end up double-, triple- or even quadruple-guessing myself, sometimes over the very simplest of things, and that leaves me paralyzed.
Anxiety seeks to self-perpetuate
It actively wants one to be anxious. If there is no reason for anxiety, one will try to find a way to justify the feeling. Self-harming behaviour, such as drinking too much or gambling, emerge from the feeling and then reinforce it. It's basically saying 'Oh, I'm anxious, that's why I drink, I can't help it' etc etc. Of course, alcohol is a terrifically good gateway to all sorts of guilt-inducing behaviour, all of which lead to the impression that anxiety is firmly in control. Bad habitual behaviours, in my opinion, often begin because of anxiety - but once they're entrenched, so is the anxiousness. They feed each other.
Anxiety is exhausting
Because of its all-pervading nature, because it wants to self-perpetuate, it uses up all of one's mental resources, leading to more anxiety. How can one concentrate on anything if you're feeling worried about things all the time? Social media, in my experience, is really good at driving this feeling. There are times I come away from Twitter or wherever feeling drained.
Anxiety is isolating
One feels alone and incapable of sharing, or expressing one's feelings. You don't want to socialise, because anxiety works best by feeding solely on the self. It makes you the centre of everything going on, exerting a centripetal force that pushes you further and further into yourself. There's also the sense that one will be disbelieved or mocked, even (or perhaps especially) by others suffering from anxiety or depression. It's also certainly not helped by a culture where people are discouraged from expressing their feelings openly.
Anxiety is paralyzing
It makes you terrified of making mistakes or whispers that whatever one is doing is not enough, or pointless, or a waste of time, and thus you stand still, not doing anything for fear of mistakes, or the mockery or anger of others. That last phrase may seem odd, but it's one that crops up with depressing regularity for me - the feeling of being criticised or judged by 'someone else': It can be maddening.
Anxiety is deceptive
You want to please others for fear of criticism, and so end up doing so much for others that you have no room for yourself, thus piling up more pressure and stoking the engines of anxiety. Alternatively, while trying to please others, you might be in artificially high spirits, cracking jokes, putting on voices or performing (I put my hands up to this). It's all driven by the fear of being disliked or judged.
All of these facets of anxiety, in my experience, go together - I'm just trying to disentangle them in order to gain some perspective on the phenomenon.
And yet, anxiety is entirely subjective - it is the creation of our own minds - and that is all. The day I mentioned at the beginning - was it different because I was feeling down? No. Would it have been different had I been feeling joyous? Again, no. The day remains the same, regardless of our feelings. And that is a good thing to remind oneself of on the shittier days.
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