Seems like there are 2 kinds of anxiety. The first is controllable, caused by known conditions in your life. This is the good anxiety, the kind that helps us prepare and defend ourselves from stress and pain. It tells us we aren’t ready for the change that’s about to come into our lives and gives us a chance to do something to preempt a catastrophe.
The second anxiety is scarier. It’s an unknown anxiety that hits you in the middle of the day and makes your hands shake and you just don’t know why. The feeling that the air has been sucked out of your lungs regardless that you were sitting still, minding your own business.
I’ve been clutched by an unknown anxiety for the last few days. I tend to be a tad too introverted, a little high strung. So when I have an anxiety attack for which I can’t find a plausible reason, that only leads to more unease. I have been struggling to find a cause, identify the problem in my life so I can address it. Lord knows I have the right to be stressed, but none of it is new or peculiar to this time and place.
I’m planning a trip to London which I can only afford thanks to cashed stock options and the couch of a friend’s friend, all the while trying to figure how I will afford being in Ohio for my daughter’s birthday, much less christmas. But I’m always dealing with financial issues, have since I was 18. Why is this different? I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that my daughter’s mother is in love with someone else. I was working on being comfortable with the idea of her as nothing more than my best friend, and now I’m plagued by insecurities over my very place in both hers and my dauther’s lives. Yet again, I’ve been trying to cope with this for months, if not years. Why should it burn so brightly now? I’m terribly lonely lately, with a handful of regular friends that I rarely talk to. Plenty of acquaintances if I want to go to the bars, but I don’t anymore. But I’ve always been a loner, a modern day Steppenwolf, who am I to complain about loneliness? And I have to present the software package I’ve been laboring to develop for the last few months to half the managers in my department tomorrow. But so what? If they don’t like it, then I will get more time and resources to make it better.
The lump sum? Yeah, I’ve been stressed and frayed, but these are worries I expect myself to handle. And for the most part, I have handled for a long time now. And for each of these situations, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Bonuses and stock sells I know are coming. A trip to London, my daughter’s birthday, and a week with her over christmas. The knowledge that even if I’m lonely today, I don’t know who I’ll meet tomorrow. And the confidence that my software is already what I want it to be, even if I will have to tweak it to please others.
So why am I having anxiety attacks nearly every hour for the last five days? Why am I obsessively checking my bank account for some magical change and my email’s empty in-box for any sign of a human connection? Has it all just culminated to a break down? Am I finally showing signs of my mother’s bipolar temperment? Or is my body trying to tell me something? I believe our minds catch patterns and rhythms that we don’t consciously percieve. What is my subconcious detecting, recognizing and trying to prepare me for? I want to convince myself that there is some glorious prize just out of my physical sight, but even that seems thin - a vague hope to hold onto. I guess I will just have to take deep breaths and wait to find out.
