Anxiety

What if you spent your entire life training for the last breath you take? What if every shadow had a face, a possible name, a criminal history, and it wanted you? What if every day you had to get up like a shot out of a hot cannon? What if you woke with your heart racing, as though you'd already been running a marathon for all the hours you were sleeping, so that, in fact, you wake up exhausted but in motion? What if every time you step out on a balcony a voice in your head compels you to see what would happen if you jumped? Right now.

What if your world was never quiet? What if every situation in life presents you with five hundred angles that require close examination before you can proceed?

And what if you hear all the people in the world crying, laughing, hacking, dying, grabbing, loving, hating, bleeding out, escaping like little whisps of natural scentless gas into the atmosphere with the smallest whoosh, the smallest exhalation before sliding away. What if you always heard the entire world all at once and could never turn it off?

What if you couldn't sleep for weeks? What if you spent every night listening, because you had no other choice, and you become exhausted with living, with breathing, with not sleeping, and you begin to see life on separate planes all at the same time? Like a clairvoyant with no answers. Like a prophet with no wisdom. You just get more tired; hungry for sleep like a wild beast in a trap, waiting and hoping for something else.

I remember the 70' tree in our yard in Santa Rosa which caused me some fairly serious "concern". We had had some pretty intense storms and I was afraid that the tree, which was absolutely tilting, was going to kill the neighbors behind our house who lived directly in the trajectory of the great tree- I had figured out which way it was going to fall by close unscientific observation. There was no question in my mind that it was going to kill some people and that there was no amount of insurance that was going to make that come out alright.

Philip did not see understand my concerns at all. He said it was solid, even if it was tilting, and no storm was just gonna blow it over. I thought he was awfully condescending to think I had no solid basis for concern. Because I'm just a person that worries. About everything. We had unresolved discussions about the tree. I would have felt a lot better just chopping it down. Because then it wouldn't be able to kill anyone. We settled for getting an arborist to make sure the tree was healthy and not about to topple.

Meanwhile, our neighbors Matt and Sue (who we loved!), were having a similar quiet unresolved disagreement about their own Douglas Fir tree which had been topped at one point and Matt thought was quite dangerous. It had dropped some branches. Sue thought Matt was just worrying too much. Being a real ninny about this stupid tree thing. We all four of us chatted about our dangerous trees and Philip and Sue rolled their eyes while Matt and I completely supported each other in the debate. I absolutely agreed with Matt that a tremendously tall (but topped) fir tree is a danger in a terrible storm. He agreed that a 70' tilting fir tree was enough of a menace to look into.

But then we were relating the very same situation over the fence with another neighbor and he said to me "You worry way too much about everything!" And I looked at him keenly, like I'd just seen my first human and thought "If this dude even knew a quarter of what was going through my brain all day he would cry like a baby and beg for shock therapy."

Some time later I was talking with Matt, Sue, and Mike again and I mentioned casually how I had never had a license to drive a car and they all became slightly more electric, but polite, and asked me why. I said that I never wanted to be the person behind the wheel that kills other people's children. I'm not sure what they expected me to say. Mike said, again, "You really worry way too much. You've got to stop worrying!"

"Yes. It's a clinical problem. I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder."

I said it very matter of factly and to do my neighbors justice they all just took it in stride and never again cajoled me for worrying too much.

You have to imagine what life would be like if everything you did, and every person you met, and even your own brain, was a dangerous entity full of constant threat. It isn't rational and that's what's maddening. I am cognizant of the irrationality of my brain but helpless to enforce more rational thought. The impulses of my brain have been reinforced by my life experiences. I was literally never in a safe environment from the place where I was born until I found myself living alone. There has never been a day in my life when I have felt protected, safe, or sheltered. I lived in a physically and emotionally dangerous place for every single year of my life until maybe it became safer, more sheltered, and calm when I lived by myself when I was nineteen years old.

Who would you be if you could never trust a soul? Who would you be if you couldn't count on love, family, or any adult in your life, to make you safe? Who would you be if your whole experience of life was that you had to protect yourself and know that when you were a very small being you couldn't protect yourself?

You carry it with you.

There is no recrimination here. I do not look back on my life with any bitterness. Truly. I save all my bitterness for the vicissitudes of fortune in the past few years. Those I've loved, those who've loved me, my family, my friends, there is no blame and no need for sorrow, digressing into those tense years of the past. I don't wish to punish, to accuse or open old wounds. I wish only to tell those who might not know, how a person gets to be like me.

How a person lives a life never once truly trusting another human being.

I have said before that I am the master at appearing alright. It is true. You will never see all my true colors. No one ever has. I attempt to show them here on my blog because in spite of its exposure to the public, it feels more safe and private than any other place I've ever been. Because I can turn everyone off here. If I feel attacked I can moderate comments. I can shut you all out if I need to.

You can't shut out the people you'd die for.

It is so difficult for me to reveal any truths that involve my family because we are a fragile group. There are secrets that aren't only mine to tell. I can't say a lot. Partly it's because I love my family more than I think they ever really know.

My mom: who I always wanted to protect more than myself because she is one of those incredible exotic rare flowers that burst wide open into the desert heat- fearless for the burns she will inevitably suffer- she is the most gorgeous human I have ever met and she lives large and is generous in her heart and unwise in every way a heart can be. She is part child and part wise woman. It is almost impossible for people to not love her on contact because she is so breathtakingly daring and when she loves she loves with all of her.

My Dad: whose enjoyment of life and whose loyalty to kin have given me a great example to live by. Our relationship is fraught with thorns, yet he has always been there like a solid wall- paying for my root canal when I was 21 years old and broker than the ocean- encouraging me to get to know my biological father though it must have cost him something to seem so casual about it. I love his laugh, his enjoyment of the silly, his simple expectation that we will continue to work things out. He has gone through transformations gorgeous.

My brother: whose tough spirit I so relate to. Whose obsessive need for control is like a second heartbeat to mine. When we were growing up I would have given up my soul to protect him from his constant malevolent harm and abuse. I think he will never know how much I saw in him a warm heart, a genius artist, and a funny brother. It broke my heart a thousand times that I could not be an effective big sister. That I was powerless to stop the abuse. That I was so paralyzed by fear that I could only watch and fall apart inside. He was my second soul.

My sister: whose sweet/tart nature I abused because I was too envious to appreciate her properly, for which I've been ashamed for years. Whose love I have been striving to earn ever since. A woman with whom I have the most piquant things in common such as our love of airports. I watch her now and see that she is as beautiful and swelling with generosity as the mother we share. I see her like a movie star and I want to be worthy of her admiration. She has grown up alone in so many ways and I wish I'd known she needed me as our brother did. I love her so much that sometimes I think I'll explode with it.

All of them have their own part in my life. Things I can't tell because it's their story too.

I have often felt invisible to them all. I've begun to feel my mother's eyes on me. I'm so damn far from perfect, her little mentally ill first born. But I have heard her speak now in ways I swear my little infant self never heard. Maybe I wasn't listening loudly enough.

There are ways that those like me become who we are. Some of it is because of the way we're wired when we're born. And then there's the rest of it. Some us can say why, some of us are bound not to. Secrets can be corrosive but sometimes just knowing why is enough. Telling others may not change a damn thing.

I have never, a single day in my life that I can remember, not felt this pressing fear. A sense of vague (or acute) danger. It has been present in my body my whole life. Getting a diagnosis was, therefore, a relief. It helps to know that it's not something I can just wish away. It's not something I can meditate away. It pulses in my blood. I will worry about the texture of the paper I'm writing on because I can hear the pen moving across the fibers as though it was a sound that everyone can hear.

There were many days of my life when the fear was a rational response to the unsafe environment I lived in. So for me it is always real. Even when it's not.

Every morning I wake up I kind of hope it's all over. The worrying. The vague dread. The panic. The sense of danger. And every day I wake up to the same anxiety about what today will bring.

Today was pretty wonderful. I got stuff done, I hung out with friends, I rode my bike with my son, I enjoyed my wonderful spouse's company, I enjoyed the setting sun on a rooftop bar in the town I've settled down in, and just enjoyed myself royally. Really, I did. But the point of this post is that in spite of all this enjoyment there is still a shadow of anxiety that lives in my flesh. It is unshakable. Like a heart defect, or a cancer. This is what my legacy is. My neurological challenge. My brain doing it's own thing.

The main thing, at the end of the day, is that I still love my family and friends, no matter what.