The decay of anxiety
It has been another wonderful end-of-the-summer day. I went out on a two block walk and the thing that most caught my attention was the wind rustling the leaves. Now, most of the leaves are green though a few forlorn apple trees have lost their dressings, but most of the green maples just shift their leaves in the wind and I look up, catching the underside of seeds yet to twirl down on us.
The wind does move. It is definitely time when feelings are changing and the maples and the oaks and the cottonwoods are anticipating the upcoming autumn. For when the wind passes through the trees, it sounds like all sorts of dryness and I expect a dozen leaves to come lazily catching in my hair after a descent- but they don’t. So it’s some sort of secret that all of us are hiding, this anticipation of the upcoming cold. We whisper it between ourselves but no one says anything outright about it yet. Except the apple trees and they look very bare and quite neglected. They rushed to the party and now they’re burrowing into their darker thoughts, sitting the evening out.
I took another walk this evening, this time, a very short walk. I can’t walk very far still but that’s okay. I can still roam around a little. In my thoughts were possible avenues of escape when a sort of soft-edged anxiety comes bumbling around in my head. It’s not a large sort of panic, really. It’s the grandmother-ly type, the type my mother’s mother and my mother’s grandmother were notorious for. Their mantra was “oh dear, oh dear, oh dear”, in soft sweet chiming tones. My own form of anxiety is something akin to it. It’s the side glance of everything around me. The possible diminish and demise of toilet paper is peril fraught, the cat fur in the carpet is a growing outrage. The dvds taken out from the library cease to be entertainment and turn into duty and the delightful books, that promised so much when I took them from the shelves are now heavy tomes bound around my neck. The simplest, the nicest things turn into chores and it seems that so often, I go around with ashes in my mouth. I throw away so much energy towards work and then stumble around, frantically cleaning and sorting and cleaning and reading and knitting and watching and…everything is a chore. Ashes in the mouth.
And now, it seems, that recovery is like recovery always is: telling yourself something else very distinctly and sticking to it. For me, it is something like…”everything is just fine. Everything has a place.” and pointedly thinking of something else, like a funny line from a book or a particularly nice flower I saw. It’s almost maddening how simple it is to fight anxiety. There’s no artillery, no flying bombs, no helicopters with black suited people getting out with state-of-the-art rifles. It’s just thinking differently and being stubborn about it. And already, just from a simple walk and a simple plan, I was reading an old addition of my favorite magazine and it hit me: “It is pleasant knowing that there are things to do.” It is pleasant knowing that I have to prune the rose bush, sweep the kitchen floor, figure out what to do with my mini shelves that sit out in the rain. It’s not like anything is going anywhere- the rose sure isn’t and the dirt on the kitchen floor is resolved to stick around and the shelves don’t scream in the rain.
If I feel this way tomorrow I don't know, but it is a start.
