On anxiety rabbit holes and always growing

I can’t remember a period of my life where I feel like there’s more that’s on my mind and I want to say….but that I’m so in the middle of it all that I can’t even get my brain to pause long enough on any one issue to actually figure out what my feelings even. Or maybe that means there’s not even things that I am ready to say yet…maybe there are things that I’m still in the middle of processing and someday I will actually know what my words on them are.

I’m glad that I’ve come to know myself well enough that I can track and understand the patterns of my own overwhelm and anxiety. An example? I woke up today in a great mood…I kept thinking about the little things I wanted to do today to bring small moments of joy into my own weekend. But then something made my work related worries spike off the charts and before I know it, I burned 2 hours on anxiously cleaning my house and doing a bunch of chores.

A few years ago I might have been like, “Ugh that bad news stole my Sunday afternoon. What’s wrong with me?”

Today I think, “Good thing I was able to channel that burst of anxiety into accomplishing some things around the house instead of totally melting down.”

Feeling kinder to myself about this situation is a win, and I’ll take it. In either case…I am going to have to eventually face The Scary Work Thing (tomorrow) but at least in the “today” example, I feel like I’m in the driver’s seat. That’s definitely an improvement.

It’s just hard to STAY in the driver’s seat. It takes a lot of mental work.

My mind’s default place is anxiety rabbit holes….my neural pathways are so well tread to “worst case scenarios.” If I’m not intellectually engaged in something meaningful (reading, writing, working) or something fun and distracting (TV, games, socializing) my brain is of often apt to pick any old thing that stresses me out and think “and then what terrible thing could happen?? and THEN after THAT, what way worse terrible thing could happen? AND HOW ABOUT WORSE THAN THAT EVEN????” My brain has a few topics it LOVES to hyper focus on for this negative rabbit hole digging: let’s call them: personal relationships, physical state, politics, and pay. (I went out of my way to make them all P’s because I love a theme, but essentially the most important stuff in life is what worries me: friends/family, my health, the political landscape, and my job/financial state.) The 5th “p” that 2020 brought the table is the PANDEMIC and the best (worst) thing about it, is that it critically overlaps with all the rest of the categories for some REAL NEXT LEVEL worry rabbit holes. It can be a Wednesday afternoon and I’ll be way in an anxiety rabbit hole about society after a total economic and environmental collapse, worrying how I’m going to sharpen my bartering skills to survive some Mad Max/Waterworld type shit.

In the year 2020…with all of its…let's say…UNIQUE challenges, it feels like my anxiety rabbit holes have found all new levels of worst case scenario chasing. But thankfully, I am more prepared now to handle rabbit hole digging than ever before. For one, I know what they are, even if I can’t always prevent myself from chasing them. For two, I am more conscious of the things that work for me to crawl back out (self care, writing, talking to others.) And for three…perhaps most importantly, I know to forgive myself when they happen, practice self-compassion, and try to move on. Because the only thing that is worse than digging an anxiety rabbit hole is spending time in one and then ALSO mentally berating yourself for it. It’s like…….the trauma of that type of thinking is enough damage without hating yourself for doing it, on top of it.

Side note: apparently I am someone who (for the most part) projects an energy outwardly, especially in professional settings, that is very different from my inner state. Many times across my life people have expressed surprise when I tell them that this what it’s like inside my noggin…and when someone finds this info about me surprising, I am always surprised in return, because I assume that I appear as perpetually weird and nervous as I feel. And I’ve met many people who seem like cool as a cucumber bad asses themselves to me, who also report being constantly plagued with self doubt. To that, all I can say is that this is simply more evidence for yet another life lesson I’ve picked up along the way: everything is more complicated and nuanced than it seems. There are infinitely more things that exist in the “in betweens” than in binaries. (That’s a whole other blog post for another day…which I will write. Maybe next. We’ll see.)

Anyway…as I’m entering my last month of my 35th year of life, I’ve been in a bit of a reflective space. I think that if there’s one thing I am most grateful for is that more, now than ever before, I feel open to learning and growing and changing. I think that my late teens/into 20’s self really thought that there was this place at which you would arrive to in your 30s/adulthood when you are just like “YUP. This is me and this is the world and I ‘get’ it all and here I am and I am me and that is it.”

My lived experience is so different. The older I get the more I realize how little I know and how much space there is ahead of me to grow if I want it.

If we all want it.

In fact, now that I’m talking about this…one of the saddest things I think I ever encounter in others is a fixed mindset. The “it is what it is” folks of the world.

So YES I am capable of learning how to manage the anxiety rabbit hole experience and it might be part of “how my brain is” at this time in its existence. I learned to dig anxiety rabbit holes, because trying to predict bad situations so I could avoid them helped me survive as a child in a chaotic environment. This behavior at one point served me. It is no longer serving me, so I am taking the actions to turn a giant ship, and taking that turn will be slow, but slow change is still change. For now, the most important thing I can do in this experience is be kind to myself when those neural pathways so well tread pull me in. But later that may mean I master entirely new neural pathways and “how my brain is”…..how I AM….can change.

Maybe in my 40s or 50s the person I will become will be just a different as I am now from the person I was when I was 25. It’s as exciting as it is terrifying. It’s both/and. It’s in between.