Anxiety: Outing my thoughts
I didn’t feel safe.
At its worst, anxiety had me living a very strange life. I’d make sure my car had at least a quarter of a tank of fuel just in case. My phone battery couldn’t run low. I wouldn’t drink any more alcohol than the legal limit to drive - only allowing myself more if my husband was in the ‘safe zone’. If we were away from home I’d check out the nearest hospital or out-of-hours GP. I’d go to bed early to ‘bank’ a few hours just in case. I was afraid of the night-time.
I’m not even scratching the surface of the impact it had on my relationship, career, social life, self-esteem…. and generally the person who I truly was (and who I wanted to be) beyond all of these safety behaviours.
This was life with a juicy diagnosis of health anxiety, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I was constantly on high-alert, frightened and pretty ashamed of my ‘craziness’.
Image: Free People
Looking back, there was a thread of anxiety running back into my childhood (I was a little girl that slept in the recovery position just in case) but it tripped into high-gear when I became a mum.
If underlying my own worries was a feeling that I wasn’t safe, I now had a huge responsibility to protect my babies in a world that felt vulnerable. With this consuming, inexplicable love I felt for my children came an intensity of the fears I’d been practising for years. Fears that are labelled as anxiety (in a variety of flavours).
I was determined that this would end with me. Role-modelling this thinking to my children, for them to learn and practise and feel, could not happen. But that’s easier said than done.
Too many precious family times were stolen. The greatest proportion of my energy and focus was on giving my children the love, stability and feeling of security I craved myself but, when it came down to it, I was there in body but not always in presence. My mind was elsewhere - scanning, catastrophising, focusing inward on scary thoughts or physical symptoms or imagined scenarios.
But I wasn’t going to take it lying down (as much as an anxious person ever lies down!). I was proactive in trying to find a ‘fix’, totally resistant to going down the route of medication prescribed by my GP. I gave anything a go - counselling, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Timeline Therapy, Rapid Transformation Therapy (RTT), Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT or ‘tapping’), solution-focused hypnosis, Theta Healing, reiki. And, yes, medication.
I began to think that nothing would work for me. I was broken and unfixable. I was utterly frustrated as, no matter how many times I heard messages about taking responsibility for my thoughts, I just didn’t believe it was possible - for me. I couldn’t do it by myself. I just needed to keep looking for the thing, the fix.
But there were these moments, flickers of hope. Brief, fleeting moments of ‘winning’, when anxiety didn’t get the better of me - when I didn’t loyally chase any stick my mind threw for me. I learned that I was not my thoughts. Deepak Chopra says, “We are the thinker behind the thought”.
So maybe I wasn’t broken after all. My thoughts, yes. Me, no.
This is all written in the past tense. It’s not because I’ve found the magic bullet. Maybe, like me, you’ve been scanning through this post quickly to get to the juicy solution. This is not that blog post, sorry - I still live life with anxiety. Choosing to not accept anxiety as part of my identity, though, knowing that it’s not me was the first click. The rest is trial and error and I’ve been learning along the way what works for me… and that I aim to share with you.
Life with anxiety is a life un-lived, this I know to be true. But in my heart I also know anxiety is an illusion - convincing and consuming but an illusion nonetheless. They say music is the space in-between the notes. Living anxiety-free is in that same space. And I’m learning to be there - and be me - more. It’s meant for me and it’s meant for you too.
