“Ignore her crying, she is like that only”, “she is always confused and troubles other people with her dilemmas”, “she seems very rude and clueless”, “she is a very negative person and I cannot have her as a friend”. I have been given all these reasons in the past from people I relied on for abandoning me. Just when I think I can trust someone, they run out of patience and run for their lives like I am Titanic and I will take them into the icy waters with me. You know, if I am to be titanic, all I want is someone to be the band and never give up being with me.
After taking around fifty therapy sessions and being on medication for over an year now, a question hit me today as I was driving on the expressway en-route a friend's engagement party.
"Will I ever be anxiety-free?. I think I got my answer today itself. No. It's not a cape, that can be just shed with a little effort to untie the knots. It is in fact, a part of who I am. It's embedded so deep into my personality that mostly it is very difficult to differentiate what's a consequence of my anxiety and what's a consequence of well, me being me.
Take a simple example, a small thing like an invitation to an engagement party can trigger so many thoughts such as - should I go or not, or would going be too desperate?, what if I go and am not actually wanted there?, what if she invited me just as a formality?, what if she feels bad if I don't go?, what if I am so late that the party's over?, what if this, what if that, what if...WHAT??! Within a minute my mind made up all the excuses and presumptions to worry about. And you know what it uses as a smoke-screen? The easiest question: "What should I wear?". This is the safe spot. This is something everyone worries about, gets conscious about, takes advice on and gets commented on. So, the mind does something very brilliant and pushes all the other questions to the back to make space for this one significant issue. Now, YOU know that it's actually the least of your concerns, but you have to fool the people around you so that you can hide your actual cause for panic. In my experience, it comes out as major confusion, chaos and takes a lot of shouting here and there with mom till I am able to take my mind off of being anxious. Finally, either I decide that I have nothing to wear so I AM NOT GOING, or, you just put on something beautiful to impress people with the façade you have been preparing your brain to put up. This actually works, mostly. You succeed because people tell you that you look pretty and you are set for the entire fiesta, convinced and smiling at the fact that you too can receive compliments sometimes. You get back home and go to sleep (obviously with pain in your ankles because you chose to wear six inch stilettos to elegantly cope with the disappointment of being a 5-footed tiny human). Though, some questions always haunt you in your sleep - Why did it seem like such a big deal? Am I always going to be like this? Is this something specific to me or does everyone panic this much? Was it my anxiety acting up? Or does this kind of pattern define me? Questions enough to start the spiral in my mind and make me regret every single thing I have ever done or not done in life.
Imagine then the kind of thought spiral a major life decision causes in my mind. Be it a decision regarding career, relationships, opportunities or threats. Believe me, it’s CRAZY. Especially, when the subject is something I feel passionately about or something I have always wished for. It’s like a hundred people and another thousand versions of the old me + the future me debating what to do next. To be clear, it’s the version of me associated with every past mistake plus the versions I see myself turning into starting the moment after the decision and the ifs, hows, whys of all those versions. And the hundred people? They are my friends, family, people who have left me, my bullies, my teachers, all those who have been even minutely associated with my life. So, the old me, the future me and these people are what made me what I am today, inclusive of my anxiety.
This analogy leaves a very blurry thin line that separates me from my anxiety. It becomes nearly impossible to tell and thus, the million dollar question arises: Is it me or my anxiety? There is a reason why I am calling it the million dollar question. Millions were spent and the Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable, we all know what happened there. A person such as myself is expected to fight the deep ocean of fears after being hit by the iceberg of life and avoid sinking into depression. The weight of the million dollars pulls me down and I can’t breathe.
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