Run, rabbit, run

In the grand game of fight or flight, I am “freeze.” My anxiety tells me that I am not safe, that I should do something, that I should find a solution, and that I should act. My depression binds me to the ground, paralyzing me and it tells me that it is useless, that it is hopeless, and I should not even bother. My brain is firing up and getting overwhelmed while my body sinks into a sofa or sinks onto the floor. Before, I would try to stop all those thoughts. Don’t think about it. Just stay busy. Just distract yourself and all will go away. Don’t deal with it and maybe if you don’t deal with it long enough, it will resolve itself.

The worst for me seems to be the fear of the unknown. Knowing my enemy allows me to prepare. I tend to overthink anyway so, I spend hours considering everything I know, and I emotionally cut myself with possible scenarios. I experience every feeling with the intensity that I would experience if the scenarios would come to pass and unfortunately, I don’t have an overly optimistic view of the future in most cases. If I already felt the pain, it is easier to handle. I can look beyond my feelings and focus on the practicality of the situation.

I have tried to look at the big picture in the past and all the fears came crushing in. All the ghosts of low self-esteem, all the voices chanting that I am not able to handle it. It is not being focused enough to decide what I should do doubled up by not trusting my mind to make a good decision. Thinking that if I make a mistake everything will be lost. Thinking that I need to have one big solution to make it all better at once. I tried and I got paralyzed by fear again and again so, that I understood that it is not the way to go about it so, I have started to break it into pieces and look at them one at a time. I can handle things one chunk at a time.

Anxiety shows up in different ways. It can come as this desire to procrastinate for a bit and take a break since the issue at hand is causing tension. Watch a clip, or scroll through posts on social media, again and again and again, with no real patience to watch any of them but unable to stop and do something else. The brain feels fired up and one feels hyper-aware of everything. A chorus of 1000 intentions coming in at once and they seem just out of reach and none a good solution. There is a sense of feeling unsafe. Something will happen. I am not sure where it will come from or what it will be but, it will be bad and my entire being needs to brace for it. I will not be able to control it. I am so tired that I can’t think straight anymore. All I know is that this feeling is here, and I need to make it better. It is urgency to eliminate the sense of urgency and danger. What’s wrong? Nothing and everything.

My head feels caught in a vice. My mouth is dry. I breathe faster. The muscles tighten more and more as if something is trying to squeeze my ribs together. Either that or stabbing muscle pain until the muscles relax. My shoulders go up and my neck is tense. I get an itch at the base of my skull on the right side and regardless of how much I scratch it, it will not go away. My heart is beating fast and going faster because I am scared. I can feel it in the pit of my stomach, a mixture of rumble and nausea. I am restless and I need to move. Trapped in this place. Trapped in this moment. I need sleep but sleep won’t come that easily. No rest for the wicked indeed. I start to ask myself: “What are you avoiding?” “What are you burying?” There is nowhere to run. There is nowhere to hide. You can try and lie to yourself in the moment but, it will just come back in a different shape to hunt you. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be doing this. Please, stop! I just need to stop these thoughts from going through my head. They are galvanizing and gathering in my chest. It feels like they are sitting there as terror takes over me. They are too much. I am too small. I can’t handle them. I can’t cope. I am alone and I can’t fight them on my own. I can’t do this. I just need someone to help. I am so scared, but the enemy is within. My fingers start to tingle. They are starting to feel numb. I look at them and they feel swollen, and they are getting whiter. My legs are getting heavy. Cold sweat is running down my back. Heath is coming in waves down my arms as my skin turns red. I am feeling dizzy. I start to feel like my eyes are swimming and I feel intensely nauseous. I feel like I am about to faint. If I don’t stop it, I will faint. Take control! Take control NOW! Force a deep breath and then another. My brain is a liar. I am fine. This is fine. Everything will be fine. I breathe deeply again and feel my chest decompress as I realize that my body simply forgot to breathe because of the panic. Focus on scanning your body and cataloguing each sensation as it occurs. Nothing is happening, nothing is truly coming, and you are still fine. Open your eyes now and focus outwards. Find five red things. It can be anything, but we need to find them. Find things that are similar to what you know. This feels new but nothing is completely new. You have done this before. Just hold on and then you can go into the fresh air. Tick, tock, tick, tock and now you are free. It is fine. Deep breath and it is done.

When I have long periods of anxiety, my body shuts down what it doesn’t consider important to participate in my rescue. I forget to drink, and I forget to eat. My brain forgets that my body needs anything in its pursuit of an answer to my problem. I lose weight without even trying, I just realize it in my clothes. The worrying part is that I get compliments for the weight loss. One tends to be socially conditioned and without a strong image of self, one starts to chase external validation. I stay away from those kinds of compliments because I could end up harming myself. When I was at my worst, I would use a calorie counting app to remind me to eat as it kept on reminding me that I hadn’t added data for a mealtime. That was my cue to have a meal. I also don’t bother restricting what I eat. I just eat what I like and brings me joy. I feel that if I were to restrict the food items that I have then it would be a sure way to develop an eating disorder.

Anxiety hides in the back pain that keeps on coming back because one is so tense, and it sometimes shows up to rob us of our mental capacity. Brain fog. Isn’t it poetic? All the information is there and yet, you can’t find it in the fog. The fact that your subconscious is so busy dealing with the state of anxiety, stops the conscious mind from dealing with the issue at hand. So, attention is scattered, and memory is affected because I am not present mentally in the here and now. I get tongue-tied and I get in a state where I can’t remember words, I lose track of what I was saying, and I forget the point that I was trying to make. Decision-making goes out the window. You get paranoid and the mind is spinning out of control trying to analyse every single thing and just go over all the details. One can’t understand how there are gaps in the memory and anxiety just bridges all of that with the worst-case scenarios. If I can’t sleep because of anxiety then I can’t think straight because of being tired, always tired but hyper-stimulated so, one can’t sleep despite being exhausted, how can I be at my best? I have experienced times when someone looked at me pityingly and talked to me like I was dumb. I am analytical and rational; I like data and proof for everything. Informed decisions always and safe bets and then my anxiety comes and just pulverizes all of that because every fibre of my being is trying to take back control and stop my world from imploding. What are we protecting against? It doesn’t even matter. Just run now and find out later.

I try to tell people that I am struggling with doing something and they just reply with “That is simple. There are so many articles on Google. Just follow them.” It is simple for you. It is not simple to me. It is not that I lack the intellect or that I lack the drive to do something but it can become overwhelming very fast when I start thinking about all of the details that I need to take into account, all of the back draws of each of them and all of the things that can go wrong, understanding that this is not something that I know and it is so easy to get it wrong without the confidence that if I make a mistake, I can forgive myself and I will be all right, it is paralyzing and debilitating. Somebody telling me how easy it is to do when I feel unable just adds to feeling horrible for not being able to cope. I know it is driven by good intentions and people are trying to tell me that I am worrying about nothing but, one has to consider that worrying is what I know, and it is my baseline. Some parts I am aware of and other parts I don’t even begin to fathom where they are stemming from.

I have tried quite a few things to keep myself occupied. Walking helps and I walk fast because I do it at the speed of my thoughts. I just keep walking until my body gets tired and my mind starts to settle and then the present moment can be felt. The wind in the trees, the song of the birds, the smell of the flowers, the grass and then I am in the moment, present in my body. Work harder, longer hours and if I am busy with that, I won’t have time to think about anything else. Organizing helps. Cleaning the house from top to bottom to show myself that I am in control of my space so surely, I must be in control of my mind. Routine is a good one too. Make the same safe choices every single time and then you will get the same results. The one thing though that I am amazing at is numbing myself. Just push it down and put it in the back of my mind until I forget about it.

There is a part of me that wishes that there would be somebody to save me. Someone who can just deal with it, and I can just relax. It was especially hard when I used to have a safe person that I could rely on and then my safe person was not safe anymore. I spiralled until someone stepped in and took on that role and just listened to me, gave me space, allowed me to go crazy, and still check in on me again the next day. Their belief that I can do it, makes me feel more confident and helps me act. I have had days when I was just crying on the floor with Bruno coming over to comfort me, forcing me to stroke his chest and licking my face to calm me down and I felt like I could not get up. What got me up was knowing that there was no one coming. No prince charming on a white horse on his way. There is only me and if I don’t do it, it won’t get done. I have to be my knight in shining Armor. I can have support, and Lord knows I need it but, I am plan A, B, and C, and I need to solve it all. Help can be requested but help cannot be expected. There is no going back, there is no surrender. I do not have the luxury to allow things to fall apart. I can allow myself moments of respite before moving forward. There can be moments of weakness and doubt but, at the end of the day, I have to accept that I need to do it all, slowly but surely.

If ever there was a life goal, being free of anxiety would be the one to pursue. I need to become friends with it and see what it hides within. Life would be so much easier if I wouldn’t spend so much time second-guessing and overthinking, trying to prepare for the worst to come, and bracing for something that might never happen. It lurks in the shadow, it appears under so many faces, it watches from the far and it strikes unannounced but what does it want from me? What hides under this cloak of darkness?