Ever heard that Leonard Cohen line “4 o'clock in the
afternoon and I didn't feel like very much?”
That’s usually how I feel on my
groggy-I-don't-know-what’s-going-on-in-my-life-anymore days. Guess it helps me
stop just short of entering into victimhood territory, because if Leonard Cohen
can feel so gloomy then maybe it’s not so bad after all; there is still art to
be made and stories to be told. Life goes on, and all that, in spite of the
darkness.
But it’s still 2:17 PM and I just arose from my bed half an hour
ago, having forcibly squeezed my eyes shut upon each ever-hopeful fluttering attempts to drag me into the hellish daylight that as of recent is riddled with
rather unbearable acute anxiety.
I will painfully hold on to the last few hours I have left
where my brain isn't functioning amidst constant chaos, thank you very much.
I used to wait tables, and once during a Sunday morning brunch
shift a co-worker disdainfully remarked “How can anyone already be in a bad
mood as soon as they wake up? Nothing has happened?” His words immediately hurt
me, like they were written with an old-fashioned quill pen dipped in poisonous
ink. Whilst referring to a rude table of ladies who perhaps had indulged in one
to many morning mimosas and copped a light attitude with him, (he also, had a
tendency to flare towards the dramatic anyways, so I don't really know what he
was getting all uppity about. No one really ever understands anyone it seems) the
statement has resonated with me throughout years.
I just remember thinking: “If only you knew.”
This reverie illuminated my body’s first pre-emptive
wake-up call; ‘it’s 8 am and I already feel awful,' I thought. There is at present a cloud of doom “ominously hovering” over my bed, waiting to rain down upon me
and drench my half-awake body in worry, fear, and insecurity.
It’s the recycled anxiety that I've been feeling all week.
It doesn't go away during sleep but rather gets displaced, perching itself on the
bedpost to watch my slumbering body, waiting for the precise moment my brain first awakens to greedily devour it. This illicit evening vulture reminds me that any peace of mind I
find is temporary and elusive. Where
does the anxiety really go while brains are turned off; does it dream of
electric sheep, too?
Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself, a voice internally
murmurs. I still hear it. Most of my anxiety is nestled in expectations and
judgments I have about the external world and myself. If I want to be anything
of worth, anxiety tells me, I have to always be operating at my highest level and all deviations are processed as failures.
In these ways, anxiety can feel like its own, separate
entity, entirely self-functioning and operational and able to exist and even
sustain itself entirely autonomously; a machine I am fighting inside my own
head.
Can we work within our anxiety instead of against it?
“The unknown future rolls toward us. I face
it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a
Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”
Comments
Post a Comment