The Anxiety Blanket

I’ve mentioned here before that I suffer from anxiety, in varying degrees, pretty much all the time.

There’s a specific reason for this, and even a specific person who is responsible for me being this way.  (I should take a moment at this juncture to point out that I don’t really care if you agree with me or not, by the way.)  There’s no real reason to confront said person, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is I’m well into middle age and should really be thinking about beginning to take at least some nominal responsibility for my own life.

Here are a few things about anxiety, about constant worry, that I’ve noticed in me personally.

To start with, anxiety, expecting the worst, doesn’t actually help you prepare for the worst.  This might seem counterintuitive; if I expect the worst, one presumes, then I can be prepared for it. 

There are three problems with this theory.  The first is that you can’t possibly be prepared for every bad thing that might happen.  There’s always that unexpected train crash or tax assessment or random imbecile elected to high office that catches you unawares.  The end result is that you plan poorly for some potential bad things, instead of planning properly for the realistically most likely event.  

The second is that your imagination is, objectively, shite at this.  Seriously, it’s awful.  Imagination is great for some stuff.  I used to write comic books for a living and it worked reasonably well for that.  It also does the trick when I ponder scenarios involving me, Lupita N’yongo, and a four-day weekend at Kalaloch.  It’s even good for making dinner plans.  But your imagination is terrible at thinking up realistic concepts.  There you are, working on some strategies for investment that involve market disruptions, and you brain starts off well enough considering actual economic factors such as natural disasters, trade disputes, and new inventions, but then it runs away and hides in a corner and starts shouting, “But what if they invent WARP drive?  What THEN?  What if it turns out that the kaiju from 'Pacific Rim' are REAL?  Huh?”  Next thing you know, you’re on the phone to your broker at 3 AM, demanding to diversify your portfolio into giant robot manufacturers and Pym Tech.

The third problem with it is that you don’t know the future and it’s actually horribly egocentric to think you do.  To think that we know the future implies that we have control over the outside world, which we really don’t, at least, not at that scale.  My hand to God, I spent the vast majority of the 1990s believing that my personal will was a major factor in keeping the planes I flew in aloft.  I had to concentrate at all times on keeping the plane together and airborne, because otherwise that 737 was gonna go into Plummet Mode and that would be it.

Now, if this sounds stupid to you, there’s a perfectly valid reason for that: it was really really stupid.  (I also believed that the plane stayed up as long as I wasn’t looking out the window.)  These are the stupid lies and coping mechanisms that people with anxiety develop, just so that they can move through the world.  This is what we have to go through just so we can go outside, or talk to another human, or deal with the Wendy’s drive-thru, or any of the hundreds of daily activities that non-anxiety people just sort of… do.

Not only this, but, and stay with me here, you kind of do create your own reality.  Now, I don’t mean that you actually give yourself cancer or cause your company to fail.  But you do move towards the things that confirm your fears.  You will drink more and engage in bad behaviors that wreck your health.  You will  become less productive at work.  You will  get sick and miss a lot of work and ultimately get laid off.  We seek out, consciously or not, the things that confirm our biases.  You can’t alter the state of the universe.  You just can’t.  But you can move towards the things that make you say, “Ah HA!  See?  I TOLD you I would get sick!”  Of course you got sick, dingus.  You smoke three packs a day and drink three pints of lager a night while parked on a barstool, because that’s where your anxiety led you.

"Who is to blame for all this?” I loudly scream at the universe, God, Facebook, Twitter, and random people on the 39 bus.  

Well, the truth is, it doesn’t matter.  Like I said up at the beginning of this, this isn’t tort law.  Knowing which parties are at fault doesn’t do a damn bit of good.  They left you out in the middle of the desert, metaphorically speaking, and raging against the sun isn’t going to keep you alive.  In fact, quite the obvious.  

So here’s what I’m going to do.

First, I’m going to forgive.  Ha ha ha, no, I’m just kidding.  I’m still righteously angry about the dreadful unfairness of this, and I have every right to be.  I’m 54 years old and lack a fairly basic set of coping skills.  I’m also not going to forget.  This is the first thing everyone tells people with anxiety: “Forgive and forget,” they say.  “Only when you let go of your anger can you Jedi nonsense blah blah hippie shit flowers blah blather,” and obviously I’ve tuned out.  

Forgive and forget doesn’t work, and here’s why: it’s bloody hard to do.  I’ve been pissed off for absolute decades, and I’ve known why and at whom for a considerable bit of time as well.  We get so wrapped up in Forgive-and-Forget being Step One of Becoming a Glorious Person that, when we can’t do it, we get discouraged and give up.  F-and-F should really be way later in the process.  Like, Step Forty-one.  Or not at all.  No, I’m going to ignore F-and-F and jump straight to Step Only.

Step Only: Pursue Joy.

And this time, I’m not kidding.  Years of anxiety have left me nearly completely anhedonic.  I experience pleasure, but it’s like I’m seeing through a blanket.  I “enjoy” spending time with friends; I “like” eating wonderful food; I am “happy” when playing guitar.  These things, and many others, generate a pleasant feeling, but it’s muted. This damn Anxiety Blanket covers me all the time, always getting in the way and covering me like a shroud.  Not only that, but, to extend the blanket metaphor, it alters the way in which people see and experience me.

But (he said, riding this metaphor all the way into the ground like the guy surfing into the planet’s atmosphere at the end of Dark Star), it is possible to poke a hole in that blanket.  I can stick a finger in that blanket and wiggle it around.  With enough poking and worrying, I can make the hole bigger.  Maybe I can stick a hand through it, or see a little better.  Maybe I can eventually poke my whole head through.  Maybe I can, someday, tear that stupid blanket apart.  (Apologies to my friends and relatives in the fabric-arts community, for whom blankets are handmade and precious.  Trust me, this is a bad blanket.  If blankets were people, this blanket would be a really bad person.)

Here’s the challenge.  Right now: no holes in that blanket.  It’s pretty solid.  Well-made, this blankie, and it’s been in the family for a long time.

So what I have to do is look for a thin spot in the blanket.  I can’t even see through it, but I can tell that there’s a little more light over here than other places.  Right now, the thin spot is running.  Running triggers some feelings in me that I can’t really express, because I don’t have the vocabulary for it oh wait no I do, it’s called “happiness.”  Spending time with friends seems to make me somehow less sad.  Staring at some bamboo moving in the wind.  Eating something tasty.  There’s this goofball iPhone game I like.  Watching old episodes of British panel shows.     

Eventually, I might be able to turn that thin spot into a hole, and tear that sucker apart.

“But John,” my anxiety whines, “what if you never escape this blanket?  You might get old and die without being successful.”  Which is a very Anxiety thing to say.  It also says, “What if you do escape this blanket?  It keeps you safe and protects you."

I don’t care.  I’ve lived most of my life under this blanket, and I really think I’d like to try the option of living without it.  

I’ve seen people live their whole lives in artificially-created fear, being afraid of things that either never came to pass or that they were powerless to stop.

I’m not going to do that.

Bye, blanket.