If there's one thing I hate to love to do, it's to spiral into my anxiety.
As an anxious person, my favorite thing to do is to predict and lay out every possible predicament of the future. This is done in order to prevent failure and humiliation, and preserve what little ability I have to stay calm, cool, and collected. About 95% of my life, I bask in the evidently endless possibilities of worst-case-scenarios so that my Future Self will thank my Past Self for having protected what I spent all my time ensuring success (in whatever way "success" means to me). As you might imagine, there is little time for me to be in the present moment and enjoy life as it is. But life has always been this way, more or less, so what better do I know?
I used to liberally call myself over-analytical but it's more than just over thinking situations that I'm in, or have been in, because I'm always thinking ten steps ahead. As my best friend likes to say to me ad nauseum, "Anxiety is living in the future." I often think that I'm alone in my neuroticism but I know I am not.
Catastrophizing keeps me up at night. Recently, I can't wait until morning to spread all the catastrophes out and indulge in irrational thought after irrational thought, so I get up out of bed and bathe in the self-created sea of negativity. It feels good to think about all the bad things. It feels good to feel bad. I didn't understand physical self-harming behavior until I understood my own psychological self-harming behavior.
I used to wonder if my life as I thought I knew it was over. And I still do sometimes. It's just that, I wasn't like this three years ago. What happened to the Me I knew? Or was that not Me? Is this just an inevitable version of Me?
When it's bad, it's bad. I get lightheaded, my heart racing and then slowing, until I fade out and back into reality, which they call a "panic attack" (I hate how over-saturated mental health language has become in American culture). I don't practice what I preach, but tonight I tried. Close your eyes. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. Acknowledge the distracting thought or noise, then focus on your breathing, until your whole body feels like it's floating on air.
