Feed me! Feed me! Now! I mean N.O.W. now! Do you want me to spell it out?
Anxiety is throwing a tantrum at you like an unruly child. Oh No, not again! You become rather restless. You don’t know what to do. Meanwhile, anxiety is whispering in your ear: You are the worst parent in the world!
As the day progresses, that voice gets louder and louder, not to mention, those words that come out of its mouth also get nastier and nastier. Your heart is racing like a race car at Formula One or whatever the Grand Prix, your palms and armpits are sweating like Niagara Falls. Soon, you start to believe what anxiety has to say about you: You are a bad parent, a bad father, a bad mother, a bad boss, a bad colleague, a bad lover, a bad friend, even a bad loser. Everything except a badass! Way before the night sets in, you already feel as if it was the end of the world. Feeling helpless, you hide yourself in a little corner wondering: Could it get any worse than this?
Welcome to the prison cell of anxiety! Hello you, a jail bird, you’ve been hijacked and you’ve been sentenced to life. You start to act like a lost soul behind bar. Life sentence? It feels more like a death sentence in there. You can barely talk let alone walk, you’re dying inside, who gives a shit about writing a will. Your freedom is at anxiety’s mercy. You tell yourself you can’t function anymore. You look around thinking: Where is anxiety? Smile, you are on camera! It’s looking at you with a grin on the face: Sucker! Got you!
Your current situation is spiraling out of control. You feel stuck. Part of you is feeling sorry for yourself, another part of you is trying to find a way to distracting yourself from the side effects of anxiety. You start to perform those ridiculous OCD rituals just to get through the day and the night. Those so called bad habits also start to resurface wanting a piece of you – your health mostly. Come on! smoke, drink, get numb, it won’t hurt! You’re weak. You go ahead and do it like there’s no tomorrow.
Crazy! Crazy! What do you do? You do what you normally do. You get what you normally get out of. You call your best friends hoping to get some sympathetic/empathetic response. Haha, little do you know, when they see its your number on their phone screen, they decide not to answer it. Even if they do, they tell you they’re busy, not right now. For some silly reason, you begin to take things very personally. Feeling defected, you call your shrink or any health professionals you can find on your phone book. Surprise! Surprise! All you get is being put on a waiting list. At best, the next available appointment is some 2 months away. Before you have a chance to say goodbye, the receptionist has already hung up. Now you worry you’ll relapse into same old misery again. Perhaps you already have!
After all is said and done. You surrender. You give up fighting. You accept anxiety for what it is – nothing more, nothing less. Suck it up! You pluck up the courage, walk up to anxiety to see what it’s been up to. Suddenly…
You realise the reason why anxiety has been crying out loud. It’s dropped the damn dummy/pacifier on the floor! You pick it up, give it a rinse, then put it back into its mouth. Next, you realise anxiety has wet itself in bed. It’s time to change a diaper/napping. It stinks like hell but you do it anyway. What’s to be afraid of? You’ve been to hell and back. It’s nothing compared to that. Before you know it, the tide is turning. Time is now on your side for a change. Anxiety is in its best behaviour – sleeping like a baby.
Finally, you see the light at the end of the tunnel. Relief is on the way. You have a quiet moment to yourself. You come to a realisation that all these years what you haven’t really done is – toilet train anxiety!
No doubt anxiety is powerful, overwhelming, nagging and desperate! It can minimise your rationality, belittle your every effort to get better, throw your plans into disarray. Despite it all, one thing that anxiety can’t do in any means is to take away your playful side – your ability to make fun of yourself, make fun of anxiety. When you laugh at yourself, laugh at anxiety, seriously, no one gets offended. If they do, you know it’s their problem.
Lastly, before I close this post, here’s a quick quote of mine to share with you:
When anxiety sucks, just give it a dummy…
Ted Tsai 