Entitlement to fear. Anxiety is like flying while carrying a boulder, afraid to touch the ground and afraid to let go. Anxiety requires a lot of holding—expectations, sorrow, guilt, doubt, excuses, trauma—and ignores a lot of boundaries. It’s like playing a game of Maximum Dissatisfaction—I create and enforce the rules, I am the judge and also the competition. And the winning prize is what? Suffering? Validation? A certification that I have earned my existence? Life has already granted me permission to exist, so why am I driven to prove myself worthy of it? Why the emphasis on choosing the right path?
My anxiety comes from a pattern of behaviors passed down through my lineage. I learned the source of my anxiety after I first moved away from my parents. I almost immediately realized guilt is an imaginary cage you voluntarily go into, not forced on you by anybody. I also realized how far the guilty tentacles could extend. I was excellent at living away from my family, but the guilt disguised itself and reappeared whenever I returned to its place of origin. Instead of changing that pattern, I dissected it.
I was raised on blame and shame, bouncing between the two as I grew. I blamed others for creating problems and shamed myself for not solving them. Like the guard rails of a bowling lane, those barriers allowed me to move in only one direction. It may have been the direction I was meant to head all along, but I was more concerned about using the barriers to succeed than I was about succeeding with my own intentions. I observed blame and shame in the behaviors of my family, friends, and strangers around me. They were normal. Guilt was a gift of the elite, and I would be foolish to try to live without the security and structure that I was gifted. The guard rails were there to help me succeed. I understood succeeding as avoiding failure.
I became obsessed with finding the right answers of life, thinking about all the potential paths I could explore and selves I could be, seeking appreciation and validation that I am okay to exist the way that I want, not by any other standards. I was guilty of being a burden, so I accepted every opportunity to help anybody with no filter, as if I owed them for my existence. I could not deny someone asking for help for fear of being judged as selfish and unappreciative. So instead of balancing my own life, I welcomed with resentment balancing the lives of others.
I feared wasting my life, and that fear ironically stuck me in time between past and future, once again defined by two guard rails. I banged against my past, searching for experiences to blame for my condition, clashing with patterns of my childhood, patterns I thought would have phased out as I entered adulthood. Surely there was a set time when those patterns would fall out, like baby teeth, and be replaced by stronger appropriate ones. So I waited. Then I crashed against the future, imagining every consequence of every action before I decided to act and comparing the assumed outcomes. Ironically, the things that other people define me most consistently are the things I purposely have avoided embodying because I was frustrated with other people telling me what I am. I have an aversion to the opinions of others because it requires me to realize myself.
I had many hints nudging me toward my natural path, but my biggest clarifying moment came from an actual knock on the head which forced me to stop the wandering. While recovering from a concussion, all the struggles I pretended not to have poured out and surrounded me in darkness. My mind could not think it’s way out of my body. All my sensory input receptors were overwhelmed by external stimuli. I had no distractions, nothing to cover up or pretend. I experienced my true self. Everything other people said about me, all the descriptions, were about the version of me I presented to the world. But my internal being was much more whole, lively and dangerous, incubating, waiting to be released by me instead of caged.
The fear I have is fear of myself. Fear of owning my entire self, of showing my entire self. What I fear most is not failure but the potential I have to do anything anybody else does. I have equal access to all the traits that I was taught to judge and fix in others and subdue in myself. I convinced myself my potential was defined by others because I did not fully trust myself. I allow the opinions of others to dig holes in my being like wells. They take some of my vitality and then I close those spaces with fear. I crumple and start to fill the shape of whatever container they put me in. I live as if I have to share with someone else, as if there is not enough space for my own container, my own existence.
I am still learning my responsibility in my own health and life. Fear is a toxin that my body is constantly battling to release. The fear I ingest from my mind is now showing in my physical form. I cannot pretend to be healthy without changing anything. My potential must be accepted by me and trained by me to navigate the world. It is my responsibility to use my true self. I cannot change my past, but I can use my past to decide who I am now. It is a challenge of perspectives. I misinterpreted my privilege and potential to be the cage rather than the foundation.
Anxious people are creative but can get stuck in a pattern of incomplete projects because of the fear. New tasks are distractions from the expectations of old ones. This is why I love learning something new, because there are no performance expectations for beginners. The bar is low, the risk of failing is low, and the potential for impressing is high. But achieving more requires more time, and so the anxious person tends to multitask when inappropriate out of fear of not having enough time to prove their capabilities. Deadlines are appropriately named for anxious people. It’s not that the anxious person is incompetent or incapable of achieving a simple task. They are super-competent and unwilling to place all their power toward only one.
How do I solve anxiety? How do I fix fear? Short-term: I organize and create. I simplify my actions and my priorities. I clean, give away, and rearrange. I write poetry, stories, and songs. I love writing—the movement of information, the releasing and untangling, the freedom to understand in ones’ own time. Long-term: clear out each one of the holes, dig past the fear, deep under the surface, and extract my own vitality. I have been hugging the rim, always on the cusp of change, swelling with all my potential and never overflowing. All because I keep trying to fit my childhood into my adulthood. The heat has been on, time to cook something real!