I’ve always had an anxiety thing.
I know a lot of us do.
We are really urged to be afraid, you know? It’s all over the place. Being afraid is supposed to be safe, or something similarly twisted. So maybe we stop short of saying that we’re “living our lives in fear”.
But we are, man.
We are.
I know this because of how frequently I am reminded that I’m not the only one out here who feels anxious about the little things. You, me. All of them. Look at the way we behave. We’re all filled with an often-nameless anxiety that nudges us to the left, wrenches us to the right — when there’s nothing really there to threaten us. We’re so used to it now, we barely notice.
These days, I notice. I started noticing a handful of years ago, and every year or two I hike the intensity of my noticing a notch. It’s been one thing after another, challenging the things that I did solely out of this fear. But anxiety isn’t real fear. It’s fake fear. It’s fear based on nothing.
I do this thing… I compulsively lock car doors. I do it when I’m in a less familiar part of town, for instance. I do it when there are people standing around at traffic lights or near the curb. I used to hear stories about panhandlers getting into cars stopped at traffic lights with broken bottles in Youngstown, late at night, and I never forgot them.
So whenever I remembered those stories while driving around, I’d lock the doors.
Sometimes I’d do it even in very familiar, very safe parts of town. In broad daylight. With no one else around. No one anywhere near the corner I was paused at, for instance.
My anxious reaction — tiny though it may have been — was linked to an imagined threat. Not a real one. Not even when I was downtown, not even when I was driving through Youngstown. I had no reason to believe that such a thing would happen to me now, in broad daylight. None of those stories took place during the day. In fact, it’s never happened to me once. No one’s ever even tried the door handle.
Running things over in my mind as I went to pick up dinner the other night, everything from the last few months, Linchpin, my trip to New York, all of it, something clicked. And when I reached for that button, my hand stopped.
My hand stopped, for the first time in forever. And I didn’t lock the doors. And I haven’t since, actually, because I haven’t yet found myself in a situation that — intelligently — seemed to warrant it.
By all means listen to real fear when it rears its head.
By all means listen when your brain has identified something that could truly do you harm.
But don’t listen to this anxiety bullshit.
You have better things to do.
Got an idea? Something we haven't thought of? Whatever you're thinking, we want to hear it. Please feel free to leave comments or email Megan M. by clicking here.
