Grateful as Fuck for Anxiety (Yeah, I Said It)

I can’t vouch for others, but I can say that many people out there and many people that subscribe to this newsletter deal with something on a daily basis, something that haunts us in spite of how well everything might be. As if our brains’ default settings were skewed by Loki, the Asgardian god of mischief. But those that deal with it like how I know it to be, it’s not funny. There is no mischief about it, it just straight up sucks.

Everyone’s struggle with anxiety is different. It is their own. Not one battle is the same as another’s. And as such, it needs to be approached with empathy by those who don’t know what it’s like when it flares up. Mine flares up almost every day, ranging from challenges at work to a new physical pain I’ve encountered. I’ve taken medication for it before, but the side effects are worse than the anxiety, thus compounding the anxiety. It doesn’t work for me, and I wish I did.

I know that for me, all it takes is a little drop of bad news to trigger a trickle of it, that then manifests into a raging river, and growing to the magnitude of a dam burst. My mind races to try and decipher whatever that drop of bad news was, and if I can’t make any sense of it, it escalates in my head without me wanting it to.

Maybe that’s how it is for you, maybe not. And it’s real easy for someone to say “let it go,” but my mind then goes past the point of no return and if I don’t have the luxury of being at home so that I can resolve whatever triggered it with whatever is within my control. It could get triggered at work, it could happen when I am out at the playground with my son. And it fucking sucks.

When someone says “let it go,” or “snap out of it” or the crowd favorite “it’s mind over matter,” it justifies me saying to shut the fuck up, though I rarely lose my cool for real like that. The beef really isn’t with them, it’s with my brain remembering shit my mind tried to forget. It’s my nervous system standing there with a clipboard saying “yeah, we almost died doing that before.”

Change The Way You Look At Things, And The Way You Look At Things Changes

When anxiety strikes, I tell people that my spider sense went off. 25 years ago, no one would have known what that means, but it seems like now, it’s known and accepted by all. It makes me not worry as much when my anxiety is so bad on any given day that it forces me to tell whoever I’m interacting with that they need to cut me a little slack.

Also, I’ve phrased it as “hypervigilance.” As in “I can’t control my hypervigilance sometimes, it’s how I am wired.” That also gets received extremely well by those around me, especially when I really would like nothing more than to jump on a rocket ship with a one way ticket to Mars.

Grateful As Fuck for Anxiety?

Who in the hell would be grateful as fuck for anxiety? I mean, if you’re reading this, you are batting .1000 in the “I’ve stayed alive for this long” category. You are this side of the soil, and chances are, you have lots of time ahead to accomplish what you want to. What would being grateful as fuck for anxiety look like? Well, for one, you kept yourself alive when no one else knew you were drowning. By hook or by crook. Also, you most likely are adept at sniffing out bullshit from other people. You can scan a room and decide if the vibe is one you are comfortable with. You can peace the fuck out of any situation you don’t want to be in, or any relationship that goes toxic. You are mentally resourceful enough to pull that off, and you are scrappy and relentless to boot. Hypervigilance forces you into it, like Hunger Games style.

Ritual De Lo Habitual

And if you have certain rituals to help with that, such as a favorite tea, engulfing yourself in a weighted faux fur blanket, putting Lego sets together, or anything you do behind closed doors that doesn’t hurt anyone that tethers you to sanity, maybe double, triple, or quadruple down on it (unless you take prescribed medication, then listen to your doctor). Maybe hypervigilance is a gift that comes with a cooldown period due to how intense it can be, and it needs to be treated with its own recovery period, much like how you need rest after you go for a run or lift weights. But it does comes stigmatized as “anxiety” and not what it really deserves to be called - hypervigilance like a motherfucker. Anxiety is Ross Gellar, while hypervigilance is John McLane. See the difference?

So yeah, maybe I am grateful as fuck for anxiety. Not because it’s easy. But because it taught me how to live in a world that doesn’t always make space for people like us.

Edit: The above was written prior to the unrest that has occurred over the last week. The content above has little to do with anxiety brought on by national and world events. Though it could still apply, it was not the focal point of the content when it was made. It will be addressed in another post in depth.