Anxiety

Many of you who know me in real life know that I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. I’ve had it all my life, but thankfully it didn’t fully manifest until my mid twenties. For the past decades I have managed with help from several therapists, and understanding husband and family. Up through late 2015, possibly 2016, I could have described it as “well managed” because it was. I took the skills I learned from those sessions, understood what was happening to me, and was able to “ride through.” With lots of work I was able to understand my triggers and be able to apply appropriate techniques to manage the episodes.

However (and you must know that was coming), I can’t say that I’m “well managed” anymore. I went back into therapy in 2015 or so because I would have uncharacteristic “dark” moods that I couldn’t shake. They would persist for a couple of weeks. I was getting worried that my mental health needed attention. With that, I started ACT therapy with a therapist in the practice I had gone to previously. Act focused on living a values-based life, by empowering us to make choices that lead to exhibiting those values. In making choices that commit me to actions, I can, usually, work at overcoming obstacles that prevent me from developing into the human I would like to be. With this, I was starting to understand where I was unhappy, the roles of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and the differences in how they act within me.

But then 2016 happened and trust I had in the public good and elected officials eroded, and still erodes. Then 2017 happened and the succession of close deaths broke my belief that if we just did all the “right” things, science would prevail, and it’s still broken with those that don’t want to believe in climate change or pandemics and therefore put the world at risk. Then 2018 happened dealing with grief and the logistics of all those deaths. Then 2019 happened with my mid-tenure review and the immense amount of work that required on top of my usual work. And here we are in 2020 which doesn’t need explanation of the disruption it’s caused so far. If anything, it feels that it’s been accelerating to monthly cycles rather than yearly.

Somewhere in the fall, the latter half of 2019, I realized that my therapy was going to have to take a turn. I had been in crisis mode for the better part of a year (2017) and the overwhelming grief that followed (2018) had created new problems for my anxiety. Much of the work that I had been doing resolving those “dark” moods was subsumed by the catastrophic events. Then that work was subsumed by the work of accepting death and grief, and that work was subsumed with the challenge of “returning” to some sense of normal. These three or four years has been an incredible amount of mental upheaval. Because of that my anxiety stopped being a known entity, and had transformed. The baseline anchors I had in my life, like trust in government and science were now not so solid. It has become incredibly difficult to not listen to my inner thoughts when they catastrophize or turn to hoplessness.

I’ve met with my therapist today for the first time in a few months. If you had asked me how I was in April or May, I would have told you that I was fine. But something in June is breaking me. I unloaded all the incidences of major anxiety since about March. We talked a lot about what strategies were working and what wasn’t. I cried a lot. Then I cued up a couple of songs on YouTube and cried some more. I’m wrung out but feeling a little better. Feeling a little bit more myself, a little bit more capable.

What I learned from her today is that is is very hard to not be anxious right now. This isn’t a failure by me to apply my therapy techniques. I’m doing the right things; it’s true that we socially, culturally, mentally, and emotionally have things coming and coming and coming. No one can get their footing right now. We can’t ease our collective or individual anxieties because there is so much that is unknown about our future in any dimension. And so, it’s fine to accept when I am in distress and my immediate coping needs to be distract and to soothe until I can get my system to ramp down. There is certainly work that I need to do, but it’s for later.