One frustration with severe anxiety is that at some point, you realize you can no longer “trust your gut” on a lot of issues.
I remember getting on a plane for the first time since COVID and being ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED I was going to die on the first leg of the flight, just falling out of the sky death… and then ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED on second leg that I was ALSO going to die… despite this feeling having just been proved wrong two hours before!
As stressors build up, they bleed into everything. I was reading about someone who broke out into a catastrophic meltdown after accidently putting non-premium gas in her car. She just… spiraled to the thought that this one time she didn’t use premium gas, her car would die, then she couldn’t drive the car to her job, so she couldn’t afford groceries, and her kids would starve, and she’d lose her house and be homeless. Here brain seized for 20 minutes going over every single possible horrible scenerio that could possibly occur from this one act. It goes from 0 to death in seconds.
The trouble with THIS particular timeline is that it doesn’t HELP this kind of spiraling, either. Spouse and I were discussing fact that so many bad things have happened to us that none of these catastrophic end games feels entirely impossible in the least. Some are just more probable than others.
I’ve had an emotionally fraught couple of months where I’ve beat myself up about how I could have handled stressful situations better. And while I’m dealing with them, and each is surmountable individually, the crush of them all together feels like the world is ending. Anxiety doesn’t help.
I’ve had to really dig deep and remind myself: 1) I can do hard things 2) things don’t stay hard forever 3) there’s life on the other side of the hard things.
Right now I’m working to focus on one issue at a time. The action immediately in front of me. And I’m working hard not to mistake “difficulty” with “catastrophe.” I grew up in what I percieved as a boringly stable country that is no longer stable. My parents certainly prepared me to live in a much more stable working and economic environment. Spouse and I don’t have a lot of outside support
I know I’m allowed to make mistakes and screwups, too. Stress certainly doesn’t help you think straight, and I was in a bad period in the early 2020s, and last couple months of work stress. I’ve turned and faced and analyzed all of that and worked through ways I could have handled everything better. Now I will work through it to the other side.
At some point, the time for rumination has to end, or you get stuck there. You have to make your peace with it and then take ACTION. You can’t go back, only go forward with what you’ve learned. My body might think I’m dying all the time, but what early 2020s taught me is that the sense of a foreshortened future is a trauma response. My grandmother survived Nazi-occupied France in WW2. She certainly made some decisions in there that she later regretted (marrying my grandfather, for one!), but she survived. And she went forward, and lived until she was 86.
Because that’s what we do.
The only way out is through. You can survive a lot more than you – or your body – thinks you can.
And that said, it’s a great time support my work directly, as this helps provide a bulwark against the tides. I’d like to get back to more longform essay writing. I think it’s good for me, and good for others, too.
Onward.
