I was going to write something today. Pressure built up in my brain and this is often where I end up. But the topic was prompted by my sister. I had a day where an anxiety circuit tripped in my brain and I had to patiently ride it out. When I described it to my sister, she was a little distracted and was trying to be patient with hearing me out, but didn't quite understand.
And I get it. And I don't. But I try. And such is anxiety and my coping with it. Good Charlotte has a song about it and the song covers examples pretty well. "Like a clock ticking slow in a waiting room. Like a doctor calling, but he's got no news. My heart keeps racing, I don't know what to do. You're giving me anxiety! Like a message in a bottle that nobody read. The famous last words that nobody said. Tell me what is wrong tonight. You're giving me anxiety!" Or the song by fun. the band called "Be Calm" which at some points feels like a panic attack, even though the message of the song is trying to find a center and moment to collect around.
Except anxiety is like listening to a record of a song, and it getting stuck on an imperfection, looping the same moment over and over, digging the groove deeper and not progressing. The Killers have an excellent song about being stuck in emotional weight called "Rut", and it is comforting at times too. But again with the record example, it is as if I finally make my way forward and past, but every so often, that loop will for no rhyme or reason just come back to mind. And I have to get over the memory of that moment again even when not directly experiencing it. My mind just gets fixated on a moment and turns it over, trying to figure out what factors contributed to the imperfection and whether it was resolved correctly. Who was to blame? Was anyone to blame? Did anyone find it as frustrating? Did it get fixed so it is unlikely to happen again? Is anyone else still thinking about it, or were they able to leave it in the past?
To be honest, anxiety is not pleasant to explain. Or hear about, because even if it is described accurately, it is conveying discomfort in a situation that you desperately want to leave. And if it is conveyed poorly with increased fragmentation and greater length of failure? Then the latter example becomes an case study in itself, only it takes longer to reach that result.
My experience with anxiety is that my brain gets stuck on a perceived threat of a problem, then hyperfocuses on finding solutions to resolve it in different ways. And this process goes on until a satisfactory result is found. Sometimes the problem is something that already happened, but my mind wants to check if there was any potential fallout from the course chosen which might have polluted the current landscape of relationships with any nearby witnesses. And sometimes the problem doesn't exist yet. And sometimes it never does. It is like accidentally asking an old computer to run a search query and the computer just puts everything else on hold while it figures it out.
I neglected to mention that often the perceived problem is not even very relevant. Though the example of something that happened in the past being reworked in the present is, by definition, futile. (Unless the problem being resolved has to do with finding a solution to being about time travel. But then, it is too late, because it should have been figured out then. And if figured out now? Then you can't go back because now is the earliest you could have had a time machine. If it was already available in that past memory, you would not be here now because it would have happened differently. ["How to live safely in a Science Fiction Universe," by Charles Yu deals with this issue. So I guess he is to blame for the parenthetical. Because I barely understand the edges of that book's potential, but find it fascinating and fun nonetheless.]) But my mind doesn't want to get off the track into actually being present and useful. So I can try to "force quit" what I am doing to try to clear the jam, or just wait it out to see if it exhausts itself and decides to settle on something as an okay solution or just gives up and lets me redirect my focus.
My anxiety just uses my brain's potential against me. I am both decently smart and hopelessly paralyzed. Both can be true at once without being a paradox. I have trouble making decisions at times because my brain panics and tries to consult with multiple paths of potential outcomes. If I were less creative at problem solving, maybe the exponential branching would not occur. I am not bragging, I am despairing at the supreme dumbness of paralysis of analysis.
There are upsides to being anxious. I try to think through problems from multiple angles, and include the input of others where I can, to check against my own view of things as rational and agreeable. I can be empathetic and compassionate at times because I want to find a solution that satisfies more than me. And people help me find ground when my brain is struck with lightning and has shocked my senses into overload. I realize my need for people. But anxiety has the downside of making me hyperaware and irritable at times, in recognizing that I crave other people to help ground me. That neediness can be exasperating at times when I am too jittery to connect and BE grounded.
It is certainly a weird realization that not everyone is wired this way. I am grateful that there are some people who do not struggle with extreme self-doubt and are able to let things go. But I have had to accept the bad sides along with the more beneficial traits. My mind can be a beautiful labyrinth, but it is embarrassing when I find myself lost inside my own construction.
