Diary of An Anxious Person, Part ...Whatever

I’m not really sure what part of this whole diary I am on. When it comes to being an advocate for mental health, I tend to share the parts that I am experiencing in hopes that even one person can feel like they have someone to relate to. Or that one person who loves someone with a mental illness can find just a little more understanding and compassion.

The hardest part about being someone who deals with anxiety is feeling alone. It’s that feeling that something is wrong with you. It’s wanting to be able to be carefree and finding it impossible.

When I describe anxiety lately, I tell people it’s the inability to be calm.

Whether I am at work, at the gym, or watching TV on my couch - I am never in a complete state of calm.

Anxiety is very much a constant wheel turning of the mind. It’s never having one clear thought. It’s like being in constant chaos.

Anxious people have trouble concentrating. It’s why we often forget things that you may have told us 30 times.

Anxious people have trouble sitting still. It’s why we constantly need to move around and are often overachievers who never stop working.

Anxious people have trouble processing feelings. It is why we may not be able to express ourselves in a clear or effective way.

When you are unable to find a state of calm, you are in a permanent state of worry.

And nobody is harder on people who go through this than those of us living it.

I wish I was different every single day. I wish I could sit still. I wish I could focus. I wish I wasn’t constantly in a a state of turmoil.

That all sounds really dark.

I don’t exist in a permanently dark place. But I do want anxiety to be understood in a way that makes sense. And people with anxiety have really dark corners of our lives because we feel things very deeply.

We are not a people of in the middle. Because there is no calm, there is often extreme high and extreme low.

Everything is internalized and battered about to consider things we could have or should have said and done.

Imagine never having a moment of calm. Never being able to shut off your mind. A mind consistently working and bouncing from topic to topic. Of not being able to remember and yet never being able to forget. It’s like having the most accurate replay in existence, but only for the negative things.

Diary of an anxious person today, is a lot of scribbles and lines and eraser marks and words. It’s a wild and wacky book of never ending thoughts and emotions. Because being an anxious person means the most treasured thing you could ever have within you is a sense of quiet calm.

Namaste

At pretty much every job I’ve worked at, there has been a high intensity on edge feeling. I’ve always felt stressed, worried, and have a really hard time stepping away from constantly thinking about work. It was a never ending worry about being fired, being in trouble, or being so overworked I could barely survive.

Obviously that greatly affected my personal life. I was constantly exhausted, irritable, antisocial, even depressed. My entire life revolved around my work and the people in it. It was all consuming. And I honestly thought that would be my life forever. I didn’t know any different in my 11 years of being a professional.

I’ve been in my new role for about 3 months. The other day I was sitting on my couch and I realized how calm I felt. I wasn’t thinking about work. Not an overwhelming project, not a difficult coworker, not an unreasonable boss. I was truly existing in the moment I was in.

Now I understand that the first few months, even years of a job can feel like the honeymoon stages. I’ve had that briefly in other roles so I’ve taken these feelings with a grain of salt. However, the culture I’m in and the people I’m surrounded by who embody that culture have given me hope that this will last.

During the week I have flexibility, independence, and people who care about how I’m doing both professionally and personally. I have the freedom to craft my own schedule (within reason), to say I’m overwhelmed without being told “that’s just how it works,” and I’ve got the time and energy to get out and have a thriving personal life.

I can breathe.

There’s time in my life to regroup, take a moment, and reconnect with my center.

In the 11+ years I’ve been a grown up in the working world, I’ve never experienced that. I’ve never had all the pieces fall together. I experimented with what I could tolerate. Could I endure harassment for my dream job? No. Could I work 24/7 for a company I loved? No. Could I put up with a bad boss for good pay? No.

Not everything aligns all the time. I don’t think all the parts have aligned for my current job, but the pieces that have aligned create a puzzle that I fit into. I love the company, the people, the boss - all those things make anything else extremely minuscule on the negative scale. I feel calm. I feel happy. I feel content. And while it all doesn’t create my “perfect” dream job I built up in my mind, it’s redefined what I define as working long term for me.

I cannot emphasize enough how important the feeling calm is to me. It seems so simple and many of you very well may experience it every day. But I haven’t. I haven’t felt that level of content with a career. Where you feel happy, challenged, like you matter, just all the pieces FIT.

Sure, we all complain about our jobs. I’m highly skeptical when folks don’t have one single complaint about their job. I don’t think the whole every single day is perfect life really exists. But if you truly feel happy and the good days outnumber the bad, that’s a huge win.

If you’re like me and your career journey is nontraditional, feeling calm is honestly the biggest win of them all. I encourage you to continue to look for that win. Continue to sacrifice, dream, work, and motivate yourself to stay positive. It’s not easy. It’s ups and downs and anything but simple. People will tell you that you’re stupid. They’ll laugh. They’ll question everything about you as a professional. But they are not you. They don’t live with the journey or the experience. What works for them, it’s not for you.

I don’t know if the calm will last. What I think is most important to remember while I am here is that it’s possible. It’s not a pipe dream. It’s not a decade of taking risks for nothing. It’s real and I’m holding it in front of me. Nobody can take the dream away from me because I know it’s there. And even if it doesn’t workout every time, it’s there. It’s real. And I can make it mine.