Thoughts

As your hands fumble across countless sites of self-help and coping, this post might have come up. I know the feeling. The feeling of your head being a electric sarcophagus. Of so many negative thoughts and feelings ripping through you like a tornado. You can't concentrate. You can't eat. Living is surviving. First, I want you to know that it gets better. It always gets better. Nothing can stay the same. Next I want you to know that everything takes time, but this method will change your relationship with your feelings instantly. The problem with anxiety and depression is often the pink elephant syndrome. Right now I want you to NOT think about pink elephants . Don't do it. If you do something terrible will happen. What are you thinking about? Pink Elephants? Really? Stop doing it. Just stop. Jesus get a hold of yourself. It's an easy task, just stop thinking about pink elephants! Not very effective huh? But this is the tactic us people

This song still gives me the chills. Last year in August, I got another episode of some of the worst anxiety of my life. It was hot summer, and the heat made it harder to sleep. I laid on the cool kitchen tile, staring up at the ceiling light. It was 2 in the morning. I hadn't slept in three days. My body twitched with awkward convulsions as it tried to sleep but my brain remained drugged on stress hormones from my anxiety.  I tried to think of how that was kind of interesting or neat. But despite attempts to trivialize it, I knew it wasn't neat. It was scary and bewildering. This song played through my head in the background of my scurrying and frantic thoughts. "I'm tired, I've been waiting for you. I'm so tired, and I need to lay down." Anyone who has experienced a chronic episode of anxiety knows the dogged feeling of wanting to sleep so goddamn bad but being so idiotically and paradoxically afraid of sleeping. I listened to that song

I've wanted to write a blog about Anxiety for a while now. There are so many topics to write about, from the cringe-worthiness of listening to self-help books from authors who clearly haven't had anxiety, to trying to navigate what it means to have gotten anxiety for the 3rd time in my life when I thought it was something I had already 'gotten over'. But identities are constantly in flux. Part of getting better is learning to cope with those stinging words 'mental illness'. It's that shift in identity, that understanding that maybe I'm not the person that is 'over' anxiety, that I most want to write about though. Not because I want to cry about how I want it to be gone (although, at times I certainly do), but because having to deal with anxiety and depression has caused me to learn a lot of things about myself, about people, and about love. Learning to cope with anxiety is a story of acceptance. Accepting the racing feeling in your chest.