I had to hop on and write this post because I’ve been having anxiety about not writing enough, and my excuse for not writing enough is dealing with the anxiety I have from all of the other responsibilities on my plate… and what better topic to force myself out of my anxiety than to write about anxiety itself, right?!
Did you love that run-on sentence? Ha!
Now, if you happen to have mastered your energy, balanced all of your chakras, and are ready to ascend into Nirvana….please feel free to skip this post because you may not resonate with it at all. (Or comment below and help the rest of us hot-messes, please!)
In all honesty, I’ve been having a lot of thoughts on the topic of anxiety and wanting to put those thoughts into writing. I think anxiety is something that we are all burdened with now, and the only way to really manage it is, to stare that demon it its face and, I suppose, embrace it.
When I was growing up I only heard the word “anxiety” from my mom and occasionally my grandmother. Anxiety is encoded in the DNA of my Cuban side of the family….genetics rock. When I was younger, I understood anxiety to be something that would arise under certain circumstances, but it has turned out to be so much more than that….and the “certain circumstances” have turned out to be ever-present occurrences on a worldwide scale, it seems.
The thing is, that I know this is now something we are ALL dealing with. It’s not just the Cuban family curse I thought it was. You see, I have tortured myself for my entire adult life trying to manage this sometimes overwhelming feeling of impending doom and worry, often not even understanding WHY I was feeling this way. Perimenopause, in all of its glory, has only added to these feelings (all you older ladies feel me, right?!).
Understanding that anxiety is now par for the course of being a human in the 21st century is, oddly, making me feel a lot better about myself and this situation. Although, I hate with a passion that anxiety is now the norm for our youth. After all, I am a mother…and a very AWARE mother at that (one of the positives about being anxious is you tend to see things from all angles, all the time…it sharpens your parenting skills and awareness better than any whetstone could).
.…and since we are all now living with, at the very least, a slow simmering of anxiety and existential dread beneath the surface, I think maybe we need to learn to just embrace it. Perhaps embracing it will render it powerless? Or, at the very least, a little less powerful.
Before I hit you with all of my thoughts on how to embrace anxiety, I want to talk about WHY I think we’re all living with it in one capacity or another. See, just as I grew up knowing about anxiety only through the conversations I heard my mom having on the topic, I know that now pretty much every child knows what it is from the moment they exit the uterus. Why??
Well, I could probably write a novel length list of what I think those whys are, but I’ll try and nutshell it as much as possible. Please remember, these are all just my humble opinions and random musings making their way out of my brain, into my fingertips, and onto my laptop. Lord knows we all have a lot of anxiety over writing things that may trigger someone, get us cancelled, cause anyone to be upset, or rock any number of boats. I want to do none of that, but I am also so over feeling anxious over how someone may interpret, or misinterpret, anything I post. So…here we go…
I think A LOT of our anxiety boils down to the warped sense of connection and convenience that we exist with. We are perennially connected to each other and the world…and everything is conveniently expected with Amazon Prime speed at all times. Anxiety looms and waits in the wings to hit every time we get a notification on our phones. Every ring, buzz, ding or beep could be bad news….and we never get to escape that, like we did when our phones stayed firmly planted on our work desks or kitchen walls. We are followed to our homes, Trader Joe’s, Target, vacations, and our toilets by our work and obligations…because email apps on our phones show no mercy. Yet…when things do go gloriously silent, we become anxious because why has so-and-so not responded, left us on read, not sent memes in 48 hours?
We all feel some sense of anxiety every time we post something online (and most of us are chronically online…guilty as charged). We feel anxiety because of other’s posts also, because all too often we are scrolling past videos, messages, photos, etc. of everything that is going wrong with the world. We are anxious about expressing our opinions because no one is “allowed” to have a difference of opinion anymore. We see people anxiously commenting on posts that they haven’t even bothered to read, or videos you know they never watched, but they have to say something…it’s an anxious impulse to be seen or heard (but better to remain silent and thought a fool….)
We’re anxious because our online existence has us comparing ourselves, even subconsciously, to “everyone else”…the virtual Joneses. Anxious to not age, to have a better body, to have a nicer home, to have the perfect relationship, to reach your travel goals, or keep up with the latest make-up, fashion, and hair trends. It’s all the time, and every day….and it is TOO MUCH.
We’re anxious because every time we’re at the pump putting gas in our cars or standing at the cash register paying for groceries we see the cost of living skyrocketing while our bank accounts stay very much earthbound. We’re anxious because we want to do the best we can for our families, but we are bombarded by news stories and soundbites that make this world look, feel, and sound broken, frenzied, and often hopeless.
For those of us with kids…well, the convenience of Life 360 and Find My Friends letting you see where your child may be at any given time may seem great in theory, but those things tend to have a penchant for inaccuracy. One minute you’re glad to see your kid is at work or at their friend’s house…the next your blood has gone cold because GPS has decided to randomly throw your offspring into the middle of the ocean or a highway three counties over.
…and shall we talk about Informed Delivery from the Postal Service? Sure, it’s nice to see what mail we’re expecting, but when that letter from the IRS shows up in your Informed Delivery email and you don’t actually receive it until 6 days later? Yeah, anxiety.
We get zero breaks from every little thing that could possible cause our hearts to race and minds to go into overdrive. We are never fully able to shut off at the end of the day, unless we turn our devices off, of course…but I don’t believe we do this enough, if at all…because of the anxiety of missing an important phone call “in case of emergency”.
…and I know this will ruffle some feathers, but I believe that 2020 and the years that followed shortly after created an even more intense feeling of anxiety overall. The health scares, fear of our neighbors and everyone in general, feelings of helplessness, and an overall sense that something was just not quite right in any sense…caused a deep seated anxiety to blanket the entire globe. I don’t think everyone has quite recovered from it. An entire generation of kids, the Covid kids, were left with a sense that their worlds could be stopped on a dime and they would have no control of it whatsoever (not something those of us Generation X kids ever could have even imagined would be plausible outside of the dystopian sci fi novels nerds like me voraciously read). Those kids were gifted a form of anxiety swathed in antibacterial wipes that may take a lifetime to unwrap. You can argue with the experts on this.
So, what do we do? What do we do. Since the reality for those of us who are not gurus of enlightenment is, that we are stuck in a seemingly never-ending choreography with anxiety, we might as well embrace it and make the best of this dance we must perform in. I feel like that just might be the only feasible answer. Sure, things like meditation, yoga, gratitude, mindfulness and the like are wonderful ways to manage anxiety…I don’t believe that they can fully quell it. They are just some really great tools to make things kind of better on some days. I think beating ourselves up for feeling anxious when we know that everything in our immediate lives is really “not that bad” just adds to the anxiety. “I’m anxious, but I should be grateful, and shouldn’t feel anxious, but I still feel the sweats and my heart is racing and and and and……”
Instead maybe we can say, “Yeah, I’m anxious, this sucks, I hate how it feels, but at this point…it’s normal. It’s a normal part of being a human in this world right now”….and then maybe go take a walk, or pet a dog, or drink some tea. We can learn a little about how anxiety helped our ancestors survive, and find some of the positives in it. I know for me, my anxiety kept me out of what could have turned into some really bad situations when I was younger (like parties hosted by Diddy), and today makes me an excellent employee (I’m too anxious to procrastinate or perform at anything less than 100%…go me).
Anxiety sucks, but as long as we live in a world that has us overly connected and steeped in radical convenience….I think we just need to accept it in one way or another instead attempting to run away from it, hide, or beat ourselves up over how we feel… because anxiety does not define us. Perhaps once we start to embrace it, it’ll feel like it has less of a hold on us.
Maybe we can pick up a book on slow living, force ourselves out of our schedules and in to nature for 10 minutes, shut our devices completely off for 30 minutes, chase butterflies, TURN THE NEWS OFF, eat watermelon on your front porch and see how far you can spit the seeds. Do that. Do all of that. Soon enough, it’ll be time to check back in to social media, your work email, your assignments, your to-do list, the state of the world…..unavoidable….but that’s ok, because for a few minutes we left our anxiety behind closed doors like the annoyingly ever-present housemate it has become. And that’s better than nothing.
(As a disclaimer, because I’m too anxious not to provide one, I am not a medical provider or mental health expert. If you or a loved one are suffering from debilitating anxiety or any other mental health concern, please seek help with a qualified provider.)
DISCLAIMER: As an affiliate, I make a small portion of sales made via some of the links in my blog.
