Anxiety Monster
When you spend much of your adult life not just questioning your self-worth, but doubting that you’re anything more than worthless, it’s near impossible to have close relationships with others. Up until about five and a half years ago, I would constantly be stuck in my head, with the common refrain “No one cares about you. They’re only looking out for themselves,” running over and over. It was a miserable place to exist, and I “protected” myself in my past by isolating. This isolation caused my anxiety to build into a nearly overwhelming wall. While we’ve all felt worried before, anxiety is a different monster entirely. There’s a heaviness that you feel behind my eyes when you're gripped in it, and a head full of thoughts and stories that are completely without merit. No facts back them up. But damn, do they feel real in the moment.
One of the most effective means of torture with POWs, or as a means of punishment for inmates, is in isolation units. There’s nothing that breaks a person faster and fiercer than being alone with your thoughts, without reprieve, for weeks on end. Yet I did this voluntarily, as many others do. Self-imposed imprisonment seems utterly ridiculous, yet is a scarily easy habit to fall into when you're hurting. No one does it to us, yet we build the bars and lock the door ourselves.
We are made to be in community. We are created to talk to one another, to listen to one another, and make things together. When I first stumbled into recovery, I was a dam full to bursting. I’d never talked about myself or the things that scared me every day with another group of men. By having a safe place to barf out the things that plagued me then, and the problems that come up now (it’s life isn’t it? Being sober does not give a rocket ride to the top), the weirdest thing happens. Simply saying it out loud when I’m angry, resentful, hurt, or scared - and genuinely being heard - is the key to letting go and healing. When I hold onto heavy rocks myself, they eventually break me. But when I let others help me carry them, and help carry the rocks for others, we not only come back alive, but we find an authentic way to thrive.
The reality is, we’re all the main characters in our own movies. There’s only enough room for one leading man or woman in these titles, and the only time I’m the star is in my own. Others have just as many worries, wins and losses as I do, and their heads contain their own story. Even now, after divorcing myself from the unreality that I’d spun years ago, I feel powerful freedom in writing this down. Old habits don’t die, they just get locked up. They can pick the lock when we let them and start wreaking new havoc, so by affirming this again and again we can send them back where they belong. Remember, no one perceives you like you do. Show yourself some grace. Give yourself some credit. You showed up today. That's more than enough.