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Personal Essay: The Loss Of Anxiety

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I suffer from anxiety and panic attacks that I can only sort of control. I try and get enough sleep, do yoga, take meds, the whole thing. But still, my brain gets ahead of me and wants to do a pity spiral dance of disaster and worry and I can’t really stop it. It’s a handicap in a sense, where I want to be working or going out with friends or doing laundry but instead I’m curled up in bed with the lights off waiting for my benzos to kick in. (Pretty, pretty.)

Sometimes people tell me it will help my anxiety to “be grateful.” That’s one piece of advice I get a lot. If I were more grateful, I wouldn’t be so anxious. I’m only anxious because I lack perspective. Because I need to take the time to look outside myself and my own problems. If I were …show more content…
Sure. But I don’t think having anxiety means I’m not a grateful person. I’m extremely thankful for everything in my life. I am lucky to be (mostly) healthy. I am lucky to be able to afford groceries. I am lucky to get paid to write. I am lucky to have some range in choices of what I want to do with my life. I am thankful that my parents are somewhat cool, that I have a good work ethic, that I have something I enjoy doing and that fulfills me.

But I still feel anxiety and worry over petty things in my life. A chemical imbalance version of #firstworldproblems. And actually, thinking about the people less fortunate than I, or volunteering, or sending money has sometimes made me feel worse — more helpless, hopeless and sad. It combines with the feeling that nothing on Earth can ever be fixed (like watching news coverage of school shootings or tsunamis or cancer or other horrors and hardships outside my control) and guilt that I even have to take medication to feel okay when some poor farmer in Africa struggles every day without ever needing to pop

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