Anxiety

When I was 12, I stopped feeling anxiety. Prior to that, I was a child ravished by anxiety. Then, one day, it stopped¹. And I have never experienced anxiety in the same way since.

I now understand that anxiety is one of the experiences that I dissociated away—it’s a state that I did not enjoy experiencing, so I learned how to compartmentalize it and push it out of my awareness. This doesn’t mean I do not experience anxiety; rather, it means that when I do, I am so detached from it that I do not experience all aspects of it.

My body trembles, lower lip quivers, and heart races, yet I don’t know why I am experiencing these physical symptoms. My mind races with irrational thought loops, yet I can’t quite grasp onto them so they feel like meaningless noise to me. I am disconnected and emotionally numb. Except for when I am not.

When I am able to connect with the feeling of anxiety, it is all-encompassing and feels everlasting. When something triggers anxiety to the forefront of my awareness, it is all I can concentrate on, and I will do whatever I need to do to alleviate the feeling. Then, all of a sudden, it goes away as quickly as it came, and after it’s over I gradually forget that it ever happened.

Right now, as I write this, I do not know what anxiety feels like. Parts of me do, but I am not connected with those parts. For the most part, I feel like an emotionless machine, going through the motions of life. Despite the fact that I’m unable to connect with anxiety, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect me. My behaviors are controlled by fear and anxiety that I cannot feel—I can only intellectually infer that I am being affected by anxiety by examining my behaviors. I avoid leaving my apartment, interacting with others, and doing things that may eventually lead to stressful situations. Yet I do not experience the associated emotions with these behaviors—I am numb.

When I was 12, I didn’t become a less anxious person—I just became more detached from my anxiety. My crippling anxiety wasn’t miraculously cured. Instead, it was like fixing a wound that needed stitches with a band-aid—an easy, temporary solution that left me worse-off in the long term.

In order to decrease my amnesia and regain control of my life, I need to connect back with my anxiety. Although it allows me to avoid difficult feelings in the moment, my current method of dealing with anxiety—compartmentalizing it and shoving it from my awareness—leads to uncontrollable fear-based behavior, a lack of internal awareness, and amnesia. I need to connect with this destabilizing experience once again, this time working though it instead of shoving it from my awareness. Then, I can address its root causes and gain control of my life again.