I thought today about all the ways in which I suffered with anxiety at a young age. Anxiety before it was a thing. Anxiety before it was a hash tag or the topic for several reels or the reason why everyone needs accommodations and therapy. And don’t get me wrong. They should. We should. Everyone should. Get therapy, get help, have a helping hand.
Things are not easy. Ever. Everything is complicated and layered and nuanced. And that is the part of adulting that no one talks about, not really. They talk about the decisions and the responsibilities and the heartache. They talk about bills and jobs and relationships. They talk about challenges and obstacles and celebrations. But no one talks about the anxiety. I mean, they do, but mostly like it’s something new. Novel.
They talk about anxiety like it’s something that arrived on the scene in the afternoon. Once it was clear what a shit show everything is and how fraught and how uncertain. So few talk about the way in which it builds, over time. Gently but definitively. In a way that’s toxic. And the part of it that’s really mind boggling is that the strategies you employ for survival, or maybe even happiness, they don’t work forever. They work for a moment in time. They are situational solutions.
And really, this is okay except that they don’t really tell you that you have to keep doing the work, nearly endlessly. Over and over again. You have to think and consider and feel and try and do and then try and do, again.
Anyway, I lost the thread for a second. Let me go back.
I was an anxious kid. Maybe an anxious baby. Definitely an anxious tween and teen and young adult and adult. I grew into my anxiety over time. I found parts of it to be an endless one-size-fits-all exercise and other bits, to be anxious notions that flitted over time.
When I think about the anxiety that suited me as a child, there are themes that resonate, generally. Interactions with people. Socialization. Newness. I was always afraid to be vulnerable and so, I felt prickles of anxiety when I had to, or chose to, put myself out there.
I distinctly remember thinking how scary it was to seek out my classroom in the scheme of an entire school. And then, it was wondering where I would sit and who I would speak to. Did I have acceptable clothing? Would I be called on? Would everyone be nice? Did I remember my lunch? Would I make the bus home? Is the bathroom downstairs better?
And success in any of these areas didn’t fix anything for me. I wasn’t better or calmer or stronger for having conquered that thing. Sometimes, there was repetition, pervasively so, and that triggered a sort of habitual calm. I have done this thing so much, I would think, that I am well equipped to do it again. However, throw in any variable and forget it. Done. Absolutely done. Circumstances had to be identical. Elements had to be recognizable. It had to feel familiar. Enough.
I remember damp armpits over club meetings and cross country meets and field trips. I recall shortness of breath when faced with parties or dances. I often talked too fast and blushed too hard and lost my words.
I was afraid of unrequited crushes and mean girls and the Presidential Fitness Test. I cringed at uncool snacks in my lunchbox and the boy who forgot to flush after pooping in the classroom bathroom and the girl whose dad cut her hair. I was, I am, an empath and overly sensitive and generally, anxious. I felt hard. Feel hard. Have always. Embarrassment, sadness, terror. Mine and that of others.
And these feelings ebbed and flowed. They came in and out. Sometimes they sat with me longer. A parent dying too early or an outrageous social misstep causing threads of anxiety that lingered. Rested. Resided.
And this is all to say that we didn’t have school shootings. Not really.
The Columbine High School shooting was on April 20, 1999, which was ten months after I graduated from high school. It resonated in the way that things do when you are close to them, in that way you can be close to such things. And also, in that particular way that tragedy guts you. If you’re human. Mostly, human.
And I remember. I do. I remember thinking that perhaps it was unique in that way tragedies sometimes feel. It’s that space inside your brain and heart that seeks self-protection and so, it tells you: not me, not here, not possible. And also, your heart aches in that way that feels like it will never be the same again. You are certain it will never go back to the original shape of it. You will be forever changed by this thing that didn’t even happen to you.
And all of that for a thing that happened ten months after you occupied a similar space, in a place far away.
And so, I think about that.
My anxiety. The circumstances. The possibility. The tragedy.
What if? How would I have coped? Gone on? No thoughts of fruit leather and Gap jeans and unreciprocated love.
Death. Destruction. Rage. Sadness. Abandonment. Fear. PTSD.
Why are we still playing this game? What else do we need to know?
This is only about money for these people. They are paid to not care, to turn away, to tamp down their anxiety, to pretend they don’t secretly grieve.
And if they don’t, they’re monsters. And anyway, they are monsters.
They sit around and offer hopes and prayers and thoughts, while they post on social media their holiday family photographs where they are all wearing Christmas jammies and smiling big and holding rifles. While other people grieve their babies.
It’s grotesque and horrifying and quite frankly, a failure of humanity.
And anyway, I’m not sure what would have happened to me. I know how I feel now.
Anxious.
X
L.
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