Hello Anxiety, My Old Friend

 

 

Truth be told, I am an anxious person, a very anxious one. A worrier, too. I suppose the two go hand in hand.

As a new mother and then a second time mother I was always afraid something bad will happen to my kids. With Maya it was so bad it went directly to post-natal depression. For example, once I called the nurse’s help line because Maya had slept through her feeding time and I was afraid she’ll become dehydrated. I kept a journal with her feeding, the quantity of milk she drank, toilet time, burps and such. Along with my thoughts about how bad a mother I was.

During their childhood and teenage years, my anxiety kept me awake at night.

With my son, I was young and naïve. Half the time I had no idea what I was doing. I had to work and study which meant he spent far too much time alone and the guilt ate at me.

With Maya, it was even worse. All my past experiences came crushing down on my head and I became even more anxious - I used to stay awake at night listening to her breathe. And keeping an ear for my son coming home after riding his motorbike to work or friends.

Since my husband got sick, I worry about him all the time. When he got Covid right after his second round of treatment for lymphoma and it was so bad only a miracle treatment saved him after four months of suffering, I eat myself into obesity.

“Luckily” for me, I got prediabetes and because I was afraid it’ll go into full blown diabetes I lost a ton of weight and started eating healthy food (well, most of the time, I’m no saint). Nowadays, when I go to the hospital with him for his treatment, I spend the next week inventing different scenarios about deadly diseases you don’t even want to know about.

When there is a war (and we had plenty here) I worry a bomb will fall on us and kill  us all or, in the best-case scenario, will destroy our home and we’ll be homeless and everything we gathered through the years will be blown to smithereens. I dream about alarms and terrorists and all kind of scenarios run through my head.

When there is an earthquake somewhere in the world, I worry it will happen here, too, because we are sitting on an intercontinental rift and deadly earthquakes happened once a century or so. Also, we live in a very old building that will come apart around out ears at the first tremor.

And even before you’ll ask, I am answering you. Yes, I took pills, and yes, I stopped thinking about apocalyptic scenarios. But they also transformed me into a zombie vegetable kind of being that I hated and so I stopped taking them.

So yes, I worry and I have panic attacks during the night just thinking about stuff and I have to breathe in a paper bag whenever I’m in a closed space with too many people around me. And beside pills, I tried aerobics and relaxation techniques and yoga and tai chi and what not and for a while they helped. And then they didn’t.

And you know what?  Even when I was all shanti and relaxed, bad things happened. My son did a shit-load of bad stuff, my daughter got sick, my husband too, to speak only about the important things. Because karma is karma and it is a bitch, no matter what. People tell anxious people that worrying changes nothing. And they're right. But neither does not worrying. Life still has with its own plans...

And you know what I did? First, I appeased it with books, lots of books, dead-tree and audio, and with many pages and poems written in its honor. Then, I acknowledged it. I acknowledged my anxiety, I recognized it as a part of my soul- the anxious woman, mother and spouse. Because no matter what I do, it will stay part of the way I am made, part of the fabric of me. And it makes me the person I am.

So, if my anxiety insists on walking beside me or taking up residence in my head, so be it. I will carry it alongside my dreams and aspirations (yes, I still have them), my books, my family and my poems. And yes, some days it will win. But some days, I will, too.