How To 2

How To Have Anxiety

At an early age you develop an unhealthy fear of people you do not know. When adults ask you your name you hide behind your mother's legs and let her answer for you. When she tries to take you to daycare you cry your eyes out until she is called to come pick you up. This prompts your parents to instead put you in the care of your aunt while they are at work. This makes you very happy. Your aunt is familiar, your cousins are familiar, you feel safe. 

You reach the age where it is time for you to attend preschool. Normally you would be afraid, but your cousin is with you, so you are not. You take comfort in his presence and it helps you to know that you are not alone. However, one day you and your cousin are invited to the house of a boy from your class. You go along because your cousin is going, but as soon as you get there you start to cry. You are in an unfamiliar environment with unfamiliar adults and it scares you. Your aunt is forced to pick you and your cousin up early because you are so upset. 

Kindergarten begins and despite the fact that your mother is teaching in the classroom right next-door to your own, you cry on the first day. You do not feel comfortable among all of these other children and this adult you've only met once. You want your mother and she is so close, but you can't get to her. Your teacher forces you and another kid to sit in the corner until you both stop crying. He finishes crying before you do and this bothers you. Eventually you stop crying and join the group. After this you do not cry at school until the fifth grade when you cry your way out of participating in a spelling bee. All of the other kids have to participate, but the thought of standing up in front of the whole school and being forced to spell makes you feel sick and wobbly. You are a good speller, a great speller even, but this does not matter. You cry when trying to explain yourself to your teacher because it terrifies you so much, so she takes pity on you and allows you to sit out and watch instead. You are grateful, but thus begins your pattern of sitting out. 

From here on out you become a non-joiner. The only activities and clubs you are involved with are the ones that don't require an audience. You stay away from sports because of the pressure and the audience, and because puberty has made you clumsy. You avoid the drama department because you have crippling stage fright, though you love to watch the shows they put on every year. In high school you even avoid joining student council with all of your friends because it involves activities where you're forced to speak to people you aren't familiar with. All of this avoidance causes you to grow up feeling as if you've missed out on something, the true high school experience that's always depicted in movies and books. The kind of experience you grew up wishing for. Instead of that experience, you get to have panic attacks and crippling anxiety. You become anxious all the time and you say no to things that would probably be good for you. You can't stand giving presentations and you rarely raise your hand in class, even when you know the answer. Even when every bone in your body is screaming for you to speak, you keep quiet. This becomes your identifier, for others and for yourself. You are now the "quiet girl" and you are not entirely sure how you let this happen, or how you ended up this way. You use this identity as an excuse and as a cloak to hide yourself away in. 

You watch as your friends blossom into wonderful, brave, amazing, brilliant people, and you wonder why it isn't happening for you. You wonder how come they all grew out of their shy phases and their quiet phases and you still seem to be stuck in the middle of yours. You wonder how they are able to do so many things and grow and change when you're just trying to keep your head above water. You begin to compare what you're feeling to a race, a race that your friends are winning and you are losing. Normally, you would call to your friends and ask them to wait for you, but this is a race that you know everyone must run alone. 

After you graduate high school you spend one amazing summer trying to shed your cloak of quietness and blossom like your friends. Finally, you begin to feel as if you are catching up to them in the race. You do things you've never done before and you have one of the best summers of your entire life. You feel free and alive and you never want it to end. But of course, the summer does end, and everything changes. No longer are you in the safe confines of your familiar high school with your friends. So you do the only thing you know how, you put on your cloak again and sink back into your shell. It happens slowly at first, causing you to think that maybe you've kept your anxiety at bay despite the big change in your life. By your sophomore year of college you think you're doing all right, that you have everything under control in your now somewhat familiar college environment, but you are wrong. 

In your junior year you begin to wonder just as you did in high school where all the time has gone and why you haven't accomplished more things. This is college after all, and while your peers and friends are off making new friends, and getting jobs, falling in and out love, and traveling abroad, you are exactly who and where you've always been. This bothers you more than ever before, mostly because you know that it's your own fault. You have built the cage you live in and you are the only one who can knock it down again and free yourself. You have once again fallen behind in the race, and you have no idea how to even begin to catch up. (You also know this is a stupid metaphor, but it's the only way you can explain it to yourself). Your anxiety once again becomes a crutch that you lean on to make excuses for your lack of participation in your own life. You want to do what your peers are doing, but even the thought of walking around campus makes it hard for you to breathe, and not just because you're out of shape. The sun begins to feel like an enemy and you begin to relish the cover the night brings. You find solace in empty places where you can finally breathe. You wish with all your heart that you could find it in yourself to overcome your weaknesses, but you can barely work up the courage to say even one word in class. And when you do your voice shakes and your chest burns from the nerves and the fear. 

You are not exactly sure what it is that you're afraid of, but you have your ideas. The first, you believe, is public humiliation, though you know it shouldn't matter what other people think. And anyway, you've never been truly bullied before, so what gives you the right to be so afraid. Second, is your fear of not being liked, but considering you barely speak to anyone you haven't really given them the chance to like or dislike you the entire time you've been at this university. And third, you suppose, is your fear of being alone, which really makes your anxiety seem ridiculous because it's what's keeping you alone in the first place. And despite these ideas you're still not really able to put a proper name to your anxiety or your fears. In the simplest terms you could say you have social anxiety and that you're afraid of talking to people you don't know and making a fool of yourself, but you know that nothing is this simple. Most of the time it feels as if your just afraid of everything.

When you tell people about your anxiety they don't really seem to understand. They assume that you're just being dramatic or lazy, or that if you would only suck it up and face your problems you'd be fine. They never seem to understand that your anxiety is an illness, just like any other. You try to explain it to them in the simplest ways you can. You give them a thousand similes and metaphors to show them how you feel, but still they do not understand. You compare your anxiety to a battle with yourself. Or like drowning in a foot of water while someone is yelling for you to stand up and yet still being unable to stand up and save yourself. They try their best to understand, but you can tell they really don't. Still, you love them for trying.

In your senior year of college your anxiety hits an all time high and you are not entirely sure why. When you first started college you thought that it would help you overcome your fears, but instead it has only given you new things to fear. You chalk it up to the fact that you'll be graduating soon, that you're having a quarter-life crisis, that you're just very bad with change, but you also know that it's more than all of this. You begin to question everything you know and you hate it. You start eating lunch in your car alone because the thought of eating around other people makes you want to hyperventilate. At some point you realize that while you're at school from 10 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon you're lucky if you even speak three words to another person. Some days you go five hours without speaking a single word and the fact that this doesn't bother you bothers you even more. You begin to dread the thought of leaving your room, let alone leaving your house. You start to lose any ambition you once had and you think you could be completely happy to stay in your room forever and never do anything but write half finished stories and watch Netflix. Even writing becomes a chore for you and a book that would have once taken you a week to read now takes over a month. You don't really understand what's going on. You wonder when the exact moment was that you started half-assing your own life.

You tell no one of what's happening to you. You wait for someone to notice that you're falling apart, but they don't. You know it isn't their fault because you do a very good job of covering up your anxiety with self-deprecating humor and sarcasm. You refuse to let yourself cry because if you start you are afraid you won't be able to stop. You realize that you should probably see a therapist, but you don't want to go on medication and you aren't sure you can afford it anyway. Also, therapy scares you. Everything scares you. You scare you. You take everything one day at a time and try not to look too much into the future. The future scares you more than it ever has before. This is the current state you live in. This is what your fear has done to you. It has turned you into a person you don't entirely recognize and are not sure you like.

For so many years you have promised yourself that you would never let your anxiety take over your life, but you worry that it's starting to now. You try to hold onto the moments when you can forget it completely and be free. You wait for the day when you will wake up and no longer be afraid. 

This is how you have anxiety.

***

This story was loosely written in the form of Lorrie Moore's "How to" short stories from her book Self-Help. I wrote it purely for the purpose of emptying my thoughts out onto (virtual) paper, so please do not take it too seriously. I just wanted to mess around with the second person point of view and talk about my anxiety in an honest way. Anyway, if you've made it this far, thanks for reading. 

Love & Chaos,
Sam