Thank you. Thank you for speaking up. Thank you for letting me know where there is tension. Thank you for letting me know there is tension. Thank you for helping me. I appreciate you. I value you. I love you.
— my anxiety mantra
I have often struggled with my anxiety. It has been overwhelming, acutely stressful, and at times debilitating. It has affected relationships, planned events, and personal goals. For much of my life, I have resented and despised my anxiety. I have considered it counterproductive and a defect in my person.
Through years of near-weekly therapy, I have begun to rebuild and reform my relationship to my anxiety, in a way that I think is not only healthier but also generative and sustaining. While I still think there is an important difference in structurally induced anxiety (e.g., the pressure felt by dominant, hegemonic systems like capitalism, racism, and heteropatriarchy) and locally experienced anxiety (e.g., the stress associated with dirty dishes sitting in a sink), and the former I am not readily convinced serves a purpose outside of revolutionary incitement, I have become grateful for the function of the latter in my life. It is important to me that I acknowledge the function my anxiety serves, even when it feels valueless or origin-less.
This not only prevents me from endlessly spiraling into even more stress and anxiety but also equips me with the tools necessary to properly acknowledge and address the root of my anxiety. As my therapist repeatedly articulates, my anxiety is attempting to tell me something. It is valuable to listen to it and recognize what it needs. My anxiety does not manifest abstractly and randomly but in response to various inputs. Those inputs, often opaque at first, can be varied and span multiple sources (e.g., my anxiety might be responding to something from weeks or months or more ago or from things I wasn’t even conscious I had feelings about).
I further find it helpful to frame my anxiety as separate from a self-aware and independently conscious “me”. I have an experience of self which is real, bounded, and solid. I imagine myself in both time and space as spacious and with form. My anxiety feels like an external entity that frequently intrudes on the “me”-spacetime. I don’t always feel my anxiety as within me but rather as an affect on me. This makes it a) difficult to imagine my anxiety as an expression of myself, and b) easier to address my anxiety as its own entity.
My anxiety asks for attention in two fundamentally different ways: one, demanding it; two, requesting it. Most often, it begins with requesting attention. This I may experience as: an urge to address something I’m not currently doing (e.g., the dishes) and is often associated with physically-felt stress, which I usually feel in my stomach or along the upper back half of my body. I have been trained and conditioned to frequently, and nearly systematically, ignore or at least suppress these feelings and postpone addressing my anxiety. Simply put, my anxiety does not like that. More accurately, my anxiety has its own needs, and by not attending to them, I induce a fear-like response within my anxiety. Like anyone when their needs are not met, this produces negative effects as my anxiety finds alternative approaches and strategies, including unhealthy ones, to meeting its needs. At this stage (and a few cases starting here for particularly overwhelming manifestations of anxiety), my anxiety demands attention. I feel a profound tightness throughout my torso, my breath shortens, and I become (at least momentarily) hyper-focused on my anxiety. I often spiral in and within my anxiety, unable to prevent it from growing and consuming me to the point of inducing anxiety or panic attacks. Even when it doesn’t become that intense, it still requires my immediate attention, and I am unable to do anything else. It leaves a material affect on me for the rest of the day and often longer, contributing to a week- or weeks-long downturn in my mental health.
Despite and through this, my anxiety and I are continuing to grow together, learn about each other, and find strategies for generative co-existence. I am grateful for what it has to say and the function it serves in our relationship, even if there are times where it becomes overwhelming. For example, I deep cleaned my kitchen (including washing the dishes) this evening after checking in with my anxiety and understanding that it was trying to tell me that I was not cooking as much as I wanted and was not providing myself with sufficient nutrition. After recognizing this, and thanking my anxiety for this, I was able to a) acknowledge that this was something I needed, b) reassure my anxiety that this was something I was going to do, c) consider my other needs and priorities holistically, d) develop a prioritization of tasks for the rest of the day do, e) inform my anxiety that while I wouldn’t immediately clean the kitchen that I would do so later, and f) postpone the tasks that could wait and clean my kitchen without procrastinating when I had time later.
Like any relationship, it took time to develop love for my anxiety. I am both proud and grateful for the ways I have grown and am now able to relate to my anxiety.
Loving my anxiety is a step towards loving myself.