Anxiety

To this day, I don’t believe myself when I say that I have anxiety.

If you take any day in my life as an example, you might conclude that I have a tendency to worry. To over-analyze. To word-vomit. I also have a knack for being reclusive—artfully excusing myself from social situations abruptly. I am great with people, but I’d rather not be around them.

I’m fidgety. My leg has a mind of its own—bouncing up and down while we’re deep in serious conversation about life and/or important decision-making. I’ll test your patience with my lack of attention and I’ll dazzle your mind with just how much I care about what’s happening to people outside of my family.

I am ADHD, of course, being diagnosed finally at age 33 in 2020. It’s nothing new if you’ve been following current trends and news about mental health issues since the pandemic. In fact, it may be entirely relevant that it took a third of my life to get help for something that I never knew I was afflicted by.

Did that cause my lifelong struggle with anxiety? Maybe. Maybe not.

I know I have high anxiety at baseline. I’ve always known this. My fight-or-flight response has always been top-notch even when it need not be. Someone just walked into the classroom? I’m on high alert. My phone just rang? It’s the end of the world. We’re going to grab a bite to eat? My mind plays out all scenarios of getting into a car accident either to or from the restaurant.

I’m on edge most of the time. When I go to bed, I’m thinking about the last thing we talked about at noon. When I have a dentist appointment in two months from now, I’m living every day until that appointment like it’s actually set for tomorrow morning. If I have to get up early, I’ll stay up all night worrying about it.

But guess what? If I ask myself if I truly have anxiety, there’s a strong part of me that quickly replies, “well, what if you don’t?” It’s a perpetual cycle of doubt, and it’s a way of thinking that I’ve been struggling to overcome all my life.

“What if you’re wrong?”

I suspect this comes from childhood, and it started when I faced abandonment at an early age. My father left pretty early on, and I’ve lived my entire life with daily consequences from that single event I had absolutely no control over. It wasn’t my fault, to be sure, but what if it was?

There is indecision, a lack of confidence and an eternal fear that comes from a choice that a single person made nearly four decades ago. As a parent now, I am actually grateful this happened to me. It means I know what not to do. What to look out for. How to consider my own children’s needs and feelings above my own.

In essence, the curious bi-product of anxiety, for me, turns out to be empathy.

I feel strongly about justice. Human rights. How my actions affect my neighbor. Why is that? Is it because of my rivalry with anxiety that I am deeply acquainted with how to place myself in the shoes of a person similarly afflicted?

Maybe I am so self-aware and so self-conscious that I remain either mildly or completely unaffected by “the algorithm.” Social media and mainstream media have a similar effect on us all these days: division. If you’re angry, you’re engaged. If you’re engaged, they generate more clicks and ratings…and the rich get richer.

Empathy, in capitalism and for the super rich, turns out to be a weakness. If you’re empathetic, you’re more likely to engage in partisan fighting. The law of conservation of energy tells us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed — only converted from one form of energy to another. A system always has the same amount of energy…unless it’s added from the outside.

When you have empathy, you spend your time thinking of and helping others. When you have no empathy, that energy is focused on making sure those who do have it are fighting amongst themselves. It’s there where my anxiety multiplies. I figured out the game long ago, but I can’t do anything about it. All I can do is watch as everyone destroys each other.

It comes down to this: I know I have no bearing on the actions of others. I know it’s extremely hard, if not impossible, to change someone’s opinion or belief system. The drive to try and do it is waning over time, and I will eventually succumb to apathy. In the meantime, my anxiety about the world and how people treat one another will only be a detriment to my own life’s progress.

When heartless billionaires argue that empathy is weakness, they are not entirely wrong. The world we live in craves volatile change for the sake of change. There is no stability in narcism and self-importance. Similarly, there is no stability in radical empathy. Stability is not a universal feeling. Stable for one person is not the same for another. We’re human. We’re engineered to differ from one another.

Yet…I still have hope. Call it a weakness, but my empathy and my anxiety are superpowers. The world I want to see my daughters inherit is one of justice, kindness, empowerment, intellectualism, creativity and adventure. In the meantime, I’ll continue to struggle with the lifelong companion that is anxiety if it means I continue to care for the world and for others. It’s not enough to have empathy…one must fear to lose it.