Maybe She’s Born With It, Maybe It’s Crippling Anxiety That Takes Over Her Body And Ruins Her Life!

That was the original Maybelline campaign; a lot of people don’t know that. I often wonder why only some people are blessed with the mental plague that is an anxiety disorder. I also often wonder why something so NOT REAL is so very real to me.

*Clears 200+ google searches during work hours researching brain chemistry*

The same thing has happened to me countless times, yet I give it a different name every time it begins to take over. Anxiety is like a really lazy, shitty chameleon. It doesn’t really change and its symptoms generally stay the same for every person, but people who suffer from it attribute it to something else EVERY single time. Here’s an example for those of you with normal, functioning brains.

SET SCENE: Girl is laying in bed and begins to feel short of breath, knees weak palms are sweaty she’s nervous (shout out, Em) and maybe even overwhelmingly sad. A confusion trickles over her annoyingly overactive brain like a mystery that is just beggin’ to be solved. So, what’s the cause?

Two weeks ago it was a cut on my hand that got infected and went straight to the ol’ dome piece and had begun slowly eating away at my brain. Last week it was Listeria, a bacteria I got from eating week-old feta cheese. This week it is my new boyfriend falling out of love with me because he was in a Shallow Hal like trance for the first month we dated. Weeks one and two I could deal with; what’s the worst that could happen? I croak or end up in a mental institution where I likely will be in a few years anyway. This week, however, this week’s trauma in the ER is really getting to me and that’s why I had to write it down.

Anxiety can change your thinking in a matter of seconds. It tricks you into believing things that aren’t true and then the best part is, they start to happen. Anxiety is like accidentally wishing for shitty things to come into your life. Examples: the more I think about if I’m being funny or not, the sadder my jokes get. The more I ask myself if I am explaining things correctly, the more I sound like I just had a stroke. The more I wonder if my boyfriend loves me for me, I actually become NOT me.

It’s a crazy, terrible phenomenon but it’s all too real to me. I begin to overanalyze things to the point where it is almost humorous and then I formulate answers to questions that are actually unanswerable. Seems like a terrible waste of time, doesn’t it? I guess what I am trying to say is that the not-knowing, the wondering, and the overanalyzing, I have to ask: what have they ever really done for me? Other than forging a path of sadness and regret whilst driving away those who mean most to me, I haven’t gotten much out of the whole predicting my own future thing.

It is a total mindfuck to try to rewire the way you think, but it is something I am learning that is totally worth it. It is actually HARDER for me to not think about anything than it is for me to have my brain travel a million miles a minute. A lot of this is because I need to occupy it with learning more and I think is a sign I am craving more knowledge, the other half is trying to protect myself from things that could potentially happen.

I am so tired of trying to figure life out. I have spent a good chunk of my 25 years wondering why humans exist, what happens when we die, if love transcends time and space, if someone can actually love unconditionally, why some people suffer and others prosper, if reincarnation is real, if I am as cool as I think I am, if I’ve peaked or not, and other really important things.

The truth is, half of this shit I will never know, and neither will you. Some people revel in that thought while it eats others alive. I am going to try to be in the latter half of that group and see how it works. Because havin’ a cool boyfriend, not having food poisoning, and being brain tumor free sounds a lot better than the alternative. Hope this made as little sense to you as it did to me.