Anxiety
a whimsical rant i did when i was younger and unwiser (also cause it's mental health awareness month and not doechii inspired)
Anxiety.
Such a short word, yet it comes with anomalies. Yes, plural form, not singular.
Anxiety and anxiety disorder are two different states of the psychological landscape. Anxiety usually allows a person to be aware, or, so to speak, hyperaware, of an impending event. But anxiety disorder—it’s not my place to say, because I’m not a psychologist, let alone a doctor.
From where I come from, which is a country packed between India and Myanmar, Bangladesh, any sort of psychological condition deems you outlandish. If I put it gravely, a lunatic. My country is in the third world, so it’s expected people won’t see the problem as a phenomenon of surroundings, certain trauma responses, or experiences. They’ll rather see it as a burden, a trait that will make them lose face in society, squashed under the opinion of really opinionated people. And what’s more, females are more sensitive to anxiety than males are.
Anxiety is still such an abstract concept. Because it manifests in humans in different ways. One may have a fear of height. Another person may have a fear of blood. Students may be fearful of exams, sending them into a spiral of dreadfulness and unease. It makes them fidgety; although some get over it, some may not. Fresh graduates who are applying for jobs may show anxiety when they are in a dilemma of ever passing through the interview board and getting the job. Even normally, people whose conscience feels frail upon the word 'socialising'’ are also in the clutches of anxiety. A brunt felt mustn’t always be because of a collision with a great force, because anxiety is a rather strong one that doesn’t need such physicality.
As I am writing right now, a sense of anxiety is grappling with me. Whether I can finish writing this in the little time I have, whether I will be able to deliver, whether the observers will like it—these sorts of thoughts. Anxiety once was a part of my life, and to some extent, it still is. It’s like whenever I try to discard it, it becomes stronger threefold and makes its entrance into my body, my mind, and my rumination.
When I was younger, around seventeen to nineteen years old, anxiety ran at a swift pace through my veins. As if I were only made of anxiety instead of the food I take, or the seventy percent water that a human body needs, or the grey matter that dictates my activities in their soundness. All of the aforementioned were plagued with the intangible, negative force called anxiety.
Anyone would find me cooped up in bed, looking as if sleep doesn’t help the dark circles under my eyes, fatigue doesn’t seem to leave my body, and my mind doesn’t seem like my mind anymore. I wouldn’t say more than three words to my guests, relatives, or even my mother. I would blame myself for being like this, being so angry inside and outside at the slightest inconvenience, and putting it out on people dear to me. I’d lock myself in my room for hours, barely moving from my place, laying. Even music, one of the few saving graces in the world, wouldn’t help me get on my feet.
Anxiety handicapped a very young me, and even my passion harboured for years.
I’ve been told, even before anxiety grappled with me, to visit a specialist and put a stop to the impending signs. My mom knew it very well: I might be facing a grave downturn in my future years in terms of my mental landscape. What can I say?
Mothers have a way with their senses working well for their children. They grasp things way before children can even comprehend the meaning on the surface. My mom saw the signs of anxiety, although she could not put a name to it even before I experienced it.
Have you ever been in a situation where a thought is very nagging and you’re not sure what to do? Anxiety is like that nagging thought at the back of your head that doesn’t go away. It keeps tapping on the door, as if waiting to be welcomed with the uncertainty of things about to happen.
One of the many highly anxious moments in my life were the times when the exam results came out. Walking from one end to another end of the room, stressing over the potentiality of my hard work going in vain (which was hard to do in the first place, even before the hard work began), nail biting, a rather everlasting habit of mine, all seem to manifest even more so on those days, especially during the national level exams.
Over here, people usually say that parents are more anxious over a forthcoming event that involves their children as they grow up. I’ve seen it in my friends who get anxious over results, but their parents even more, though they try to hide it. It is almost as if children start understanding their parents’ sentiments, although it differs depending on how fast or how slowly every person does so. But somehow, in my family, all the anxious thinking has been done by me more than by my mother or my father. My father’s rather indifferent; he’s alright with however I fare. Same for my mother, except at times she says I could do better. It adds to my anxiety to not repeat the same thing ever again, or at least often, although her way of saying it is not hostile at all.
Another big moment where I was anxious was when I started going to the university. I was twenty, and a dark cloud of anxiety was looming over me. I was sensitive and way too aware of my surroundings. People tried to talk to me, yet I was aloof from doing so. Even the smallest hello would cause me to be alarmed. The forthcoming stress of study, which never seems to end, rather built a halo, neither trying to crumble to pieces nor trying to vanish into thin air. At the same time, I was going through the end of my friendship with a girl I'd been with for seven years of my life. The thought of making new friendships and the uncertainty of those ties being severed put me in a rather distressed position.
You might be thinking so far: is this person ever free of anxiety for once in her life? I used to be free of it. It’s before I started to grow older, and the reasons why anxiety started to infest me started to increase as well.
In my experience, anxiety never came to me with a warning sign about how it might cost me a lot of things, but mostly my academic performance as well as my passion walking beside. Academic performance was something I was not good at even before, but the landscape changed, and I started to do well before going back to not doing well. The latter one is anxiety-induced because I had no sense of direction in life, along with dealing with my sister, who has had a neurological disorder since her birth.
Nowadays, my anxiety surrounds my future and my sister. My sister is a more restless person than quiet, and the unpredictability of her sentiments keeps me on edge. One time she’s cheery and yielding; another time she’s moody and unyielding, resisting every single request sent her way. Be it telling her to calm herself down or waiting until she is given what she asked for, her moody self disallows patience. Although it isn’t her fault that she’s built this way, it doesn’t help the anxious feeling at the back of my head.
About the future, almost all of us are anxious. What it might bring, what it might not bring, and the mountain climbing we have to do in between. It’s like we’re the guinea pig running on the rotating wheel, not seeing any end to the anxious feeling, the nagging at the back of the head feeding you every possible negativity that gets you nail-biting about the future you’re uncertain of. One of the clinical symptoms of anxiety is tiredness or fatigue, and to some extent, I think I can grasp why it is marked as a manifestation.
Body and mind are connected more than ever, and the mind's tiredness shows itself in the body.
With an anxious mind, I tried to study during my high school years. When my brain couldn’t hold any more information, I felt tired. As if my entire body is telling itself to drop everything and curl itself on the bed, the companion that never failed me at that point. Because of my luck, I felt like working towards my future would be pointless. Yet, it also stirred an untold fear in me if I didn’t do so. As I go everywhere, anxiety decides to build its wall.
As I submit this piece of writing, it might not even scratch the surface. But I wanted to write a piece of work where I could tell about myself, my own experience with anxiety, and imagine how crippling it might be for those who suffer more than a normal amount. I’m not out of it yet, but I’m certainly trying to be.