Let’s talk about anxiety. (Oh, and for those of you back home who’ve been keeping track since that last post, yes I have actually started editing my thesis. I swear. I know this looks bad. I mean, another blog post… no way she’s working on that thing she needs to graduate! But… c’mon, guys, a girl needs a break! I’ve deleted and changed and fixed and added in three whole fucking pages of new content from three new primary sources so look, it’s getting done, okay?!)
Right. Um. Anxiety. So, there are all those websites out there that talk about what “anxiety” is, right? All those ads with comic character-style people in it spewing out some symptoms for you and telling you which drug they’re promoting you absolutely need to buy? Maybe even a couple of helpful informational pamphlet things you shoved in the bottom of your purse the last time you visited the doctor’s office?
Yeah, so all those things, they’re probably telling you about how anxiety (and its devil spawn, panic attacks) can make it feel like your heart is beating really fast, you may be hyperventilating, basically it feels like you’re being run over by the pounding feet of a herd of elephants while your heart and stomach and brain are getting convulsed and squeezed and honked like clown horns?
Yeah, no. My anxiety isn’t like that.
Obviously, I’m not saying that *nobody’s* anxiety is like that. I know people who have given that exact description before (okay, maybe not that exact description) for what they experience. Fast, frenetic, some other f words – that’s the dealio for them.
But not for me. My anxiety, it’s… slower? When I am “anxious,” I am not fidgety. I am frozen. Instead of feeling like a hot mess, I feel like a cold… nothing. My anxiety doesn’t make me want to dash out of the room – it hardens my insides like ice, paralyzing me right where I am. I can’t think. I can’t focus. It’s like my brain’s eyes rolled back in their sockets or something. Like I’ve suddenly hardened into a block of cold, black metal.
And fuck, is it uncomfortable. Rather than feeling like my lungs have suddenly become a pair of poor over-filled balloons being torturously squeezed by some manic two-year-old, my body, all of it, suddenly feels like it’s been… compacted. Like someone took all my muscle fibers and coiled them. I am tense. I am not bursting. I am strung. I get this kind of general ache everywhere, like the kind you get when you’re heading into a particularly bad cold. Or like somebody decided to wash my insides with lactic acid. Or like my entire body is suddenly a uterus and it’s that time when Mother-In-Law Nature decides to come for a particularly nasty week-long visit.
There is a nervousness, and sometimes I do shake and spasm (but hey, at least I get my core exercises in for the day, right?), but it’s not, like, heaving or hyperventilating or any of that. And the world doesn’t spin, it… fades. Like a movie shot does when you suddenly pull out from a freeze frame so that the
llama protagonist can make snarky comments and draw red marks all over everything. (The search terms I had to use to find that image… dear NSA surveillance workers who are currently incapacitated on the floor from laughter,
you’re welcome.)
Anyhoo. This anxiety thing. It’s different for me. But I’m still pretty sure what I experience is anxiety. I mean I’m nervous, right? I feel overwhelmed, I’m incapacitated to a degree, I hug my knees and stare through a fog of muted blind terror – that’s still anxiety, right?
If I go through the traditional symptom list, pretty sure the answer is no. The phrasing that list uses, it doesn’t *quite* fit with my set of descriptions. And it can feel really damn invalidating. There are multiple brands of depression that get talked about in all the different mediums, why can’t my type of anxiety get its share of internet space? Sure, thankfully the first psychiatrist I came into contact with way-back-when knew her shit, and “anxiety” was definitely a word she brought into our conversations. But my current psychiatrist? Mental health site “anxiety reduction” self-help articles? Cultural chatter at large? Nope.
But… I know what I know. I know what I feel. I feel what I feel. And I know it’s anxiety. I know that my anxiety is not “just in my head” (my core muscles can attest to that, thank you very much). I know that saying I have anxiety is not just some cop out to try to stick some label-excuse on some personal shortcoming. I know that my anxiety is a very real obstacle in my life that I have to deal with. (Btw, by “deal with,” I pretty much mean “sit on my boyfriend’s couch or on the floor of my dorm room being miserable through it until it eventually goes away because I managed to distract myself with the internet well enough. Sorry, I don’t have a magic – or even better – solution to anxiety to give you. I wish I did, really.)
So, whatever the chattering “experts” may say (or really, not say), whatever the eternal skeptic in my head that constantly looks to pick a fight may hurl at me, whatever doubt may well up from inside me and pump up the disconnection from reality I sometimes experience by telling me that that experience itself isn’t even real, in my more sane moments (and somehow even in most of my un-sane ones), I still know that my understanding of what’s going on inside of me is true. I know it isn’t made up. I know that even though it might be different, my anxiety is not a lie.
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Tags: anxiety, cold, depression, disconnected, explain, fade, Frozen, mental health, nervous, not a lie, paralyzed, real, reality, stuck, symptom, true, uncertain, understanding
Quill Aquiver 
Having experienced both types of anxiety, they all suck. Stay strong, honey.