the age of anxiety
anxiety, my darling, are you friend or are you foe?
In a bit of an unusual fashion for an article of mine, I am, at the moment, working through the present instead of the past.
The irony is baked right into the title of this piece because, truly, every age has been held together by a profusion of anxiety carefully working its magic to hold my existence steady on this earth.
Anxiety has always been momentum. The wind beneath my sails, so to speak.
Fuel when I refused to eat.
Friend when I had none.
Refuge when raucous instability churns around me.
In the depths of my eating disorder, I was often offered medicine in various forms to squelch the onslaught of imbalanced neurochemicals and thoughts that were the very antithesis of what recovery required of me.
But I always declined, knowing that I needed Anxiety and nothing could replace her.
She kept the depression away. Or, I suppose, when depression came knocking, Anxiety was the only one convincing enough to get me out of bed.
Anxiety fueled the disordered behavior I clung to. Grueling rules to keep me thin were strictly enforced by this omnipresent dictator.
Sitting through the discomfort it raised in my body – tight chest, shallow breathing, untamed electricity pulsing through my veins – seemed a small price to pay for the control it ushered. Conducting life seamlessly, while I watched from the sidelines in awe. Sure, I felt left out from time to time, and often I longed to jump into the action, confident that I had a thought or opinion that could be of crucial assistance.
But Anxiety always turned me down. I was a novice after all. Nothing more than a scared little girl who knew nothing of the horrors that lay beyond my sideline safe haven.
Anxiety saved me from choices and their consequences. It navigated the churning sea with deft confidence. It wove the tapestry of my life with nimble fingers.
All it asked for in return was my silence & submission.
Don’t get in the way, little girl.
Then Anxiety almost killed us both, power-hungry insanity sinking the ship, and I had to claw my way free from its delusional antics and fight like hell to keep my head above water.
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Therapy has kept me treading water, yes. It has even taught me how to swim, to some degree.
It’s given me language and knowledge, and I do believe that knowledge is a sword. But what therapy has never given me, until maybe recently, is any training on how to wield said sword, and who I should be aiming for when I do.
So often, I feel that I am my own worst enemy. That to punish myself is to punish away my pain. As if depriving myself will somehow lead me to clarity instead of just diminishing me to nothingness. For years, I didn’t know how to fight, only to defend.
A smaller target is harder to hit.
Without a shield or a weapon with which to fight back, my best choice was to hide. And the best way to hide was by letting Anxiety mask me, protect me, guide me, save me.
Friend or foe, then?
