Fun fact about me: from the moment that I was diagnosed with leukemia in January of 2018 until I went into remission seven-plus months later, my anxiety disappeared.
(I was wildly anxious leading up to my diagnosis - before Peter drove me to the ER for what would eventually be my cancer diagnosis, I told him, “I’m afraid they’re going to tell me that there’s nothing wrong with me and that I’m being a big baby.” It was the exact opposite of that, as it turns out.)
When I was in the midst of the Cancer Adventure, I didn’t feel anxious because there wasn’t any way for me to be wrong - in terms of treatment, I trusted my doctors and we created a plan and then we did it step by step. And I feel like, in all of the non-cancer parts of my life, leukemia gave me the biggest possible permission slip to just do whatever felt right for me at the time. I felt completely freed of the pressure to respond to messages or placate people that I didn’t want to deal with or choose anything to do, moment to moment, that didn’t sound good to me. (Which was its own difficulty - I’d never really listened to my internal voices before, and so there was and still is a lot of what feels like a lot of random direction changes or instincts I don’t understand logically, so I’m still stepping through that and figuring things out.)
When I got back into “normal life,” my anxiety came back, because everything was back in my hands. Because I had gotten through this big scary thing and survived, I felt a lot of pressure to make the most of things - to succeed, to be happy, to seize the day and be even better than I had been. I didn’t give myself any time to adjust, to look back at what had just happened and maybe process it a little bit - I just threw myself back into what had been “normal” for me and what I desperately wanted to be normal again. And that meant I could fail - that meant I could take a wrong step and stumble and screw up and step backwards. Which is what my anxiety is always trying to protect me from.
Cut to now, March 2020, the Pandemic Times.
I signed up for this thirty-day #JournalYourFeelings challenge, because being conscious of and being able to listen to my own feelings is still incredibly difficult for me, and journaling is a comfortable venue for me to work with that. We’re five days in, as of today, and it’s been a weird exercise - a lot of the prompts have been personalizing concepts like Fear, Inner Wisdom, your Inner Child, etc., and that doesn’t really resonate with my brain, which naturally tends to see things in a really concrete way. But I’m trying - all I can do is show up and try.
Today’s prompt stumped me, though. The challenge today was to write a list of all of the fearful and anxious thoughts I’m having, and … I didn’t have any? I couldn’t think of any.
I’m not saying that I haven’t been fearful and anxious over the last two weeks, since the world shut down - I definitely have. Lots of tension in my jaw, tightness in my chest, shallow breathing, headaches. It comes and goes - some days I feel fine, and some days I’m pretty useless.
But let’s break it down: I’m an introvert homebody, so being at home with my favorite human is what I want to do most of the time anyway. I have a job where I can easily work from home, and the company that I work for is sensible and supportive. I have a house that’s comfortable, and large enough that Peter and I can both work from home without getting on each other’s nerves; we’re financially comfortable, so we can get things delivered as we need to. I live 5 minutes from a grocery store, and we don’t have any special supply needs.
As long as I follow the rules, and stay home except for a run to the grocery store every couple of weeks, there’s no way for me to be wrong here. So my anxiety doesn’t have a lot to say.
My husband has anxiety, too - he’s never seen a professional about it, but I don’t think either of us have any doubt about it. But the two of us experience anxiety, and react to anxiety, in almost completely opposite ways.
Peter trusts himself completely, in a way I find awe-inspiring, frankly. He’s self-aware and able to examine his own thoughts and beliefs, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him doubt that the option he’s chosen is the right one. When he needs to make a decision or a choice, he digs in, gathers information, and picks based on what’s most likely to have the outcome that he wants. And then he does it. I’ve never seen him second-guess himself once he has decided. It’s so cool as to be almost magical to me.
However, there’s a lot of things in the world that he can’t control, and those are the things that worry him. He keeps an extremely close eye on the weather. Traffic makes him so angry that he’s shifted his work schedule two full hours just to miss the bulk of it. His most common frustration is when he can’t understand - when he can’t imagine why something isn’t unfolding logically.
Whereas things I can’t control roll off my back, in a major way. Weather and traffic and the stock market are just big forces that will do their thing regardless of what I do - they may overlap with my life, or they may not, but it doesn’t make sense for me to do anything about it until it comes along and I know what I’m dealing with. I don’t need to know it’s going to snow the night before; I need to know it before I open the door, so I can grab my boots. I think this is a consequence of a childhood that felt very chaotic and where I frequently felt that our family was right at the edge of financial ruin, which doesn’t sound great when I say it like that, but it has had the weird side effect of shearing off a lot of what makes other people anxious.
I want to let it all exist outside of my bubble; Peter needs to take it all in so that he knows what to do. We don’t always play well together that way.
But that means I am not having anxious or fearful thoughts about what’s going to happen next, or what happens if the economy crashes, or what happens if one of us gets sick, or if the grocery stores run out of food, or if we all turn on each other, or or or…
I’m having anxious thoughts about whether my husband is mad at me because the shower broke while I was in it, or whether I’m a good friend because I don’t like talking on the phone, or whether I’m eating too many carbs - all of the same things I have anxious thoughts about when we’re not all confined to our homes to stop the spread of a novel virus. Because my anxiety wants me to be perfect; it doesn’t expect that the world will be.