cw: anxiety
I’m writing this as a reminder to myself, and sharing it in case it helps you too
Out of all of my mental struggles, anxiety remains the one thing that rears its head almost every day. For a variety of reasons, I’ve experienced a reassurance of it over the last several months. And today it demanded an extra amount of attention for no one clear reason (classic).
So surely I remembered to be gentle with myself and to remember that negative emotions are part of being alive, right? Wrong.
Instead, I found myself frustrated that I couldn’t simply address or work through the anxiety quickly. Annoyed that it wasn’t going away just because I asked it to. I found myself feeling like a failure because I couldn’t solve my “problem” quickly and efficiently.
But, of course, that’s not how emotions work. That’s not how our brains work. And we cannot magically optimize our way out of feeling (nor should we!) using some magical wisdom we found in a LinkedIn *eye roll* self-help post.
Here’s what I’m reminding myself of: Working through difficult emotions and the sensations that come with them takes time. In a world where we are pressured to solve our problems by working hard and finding a fast solution, I will slow down and allow myself to be patient, gentle, and curious. I do not need to simply “get over it.”
Embarrassingly, it took me over an hour of sitting in silence to remember the lessons that I seem to need refreshers on far more often than I’d like to think. And, in a twist of supreme irony, I find myself feeling ashamed that it took me so long to remember all of this. But I’m choosing to focus on the fact that I could at least identify what I need to work on and identify the shame I felt in not remembering. And now I’m being gentle with myself again. And at the end of the day that the best I can do. No matter how you feel or what’s going on in your live.
So, to my anxiety: we’ll keep having our conversations, you can always show up as a guest, but you are visiting my home. I will care for you… but in my home, I make the rules and set the boundaries, and I’m learning to enforce them.
I hope you will be gentle with yourself too :)
