My Anxiety, Part II: The Feelings

Continuing from my last post, let us look at the main question: what is it like to have crippling anxiety? I consider mine to be “crippling” because it affects my ability to do simple tasks, like drive a car, for example, or sometimes just leave my home. Most people do not understand this and think I’m just lazy or that I need to change my way of thinking. That is not how it works — you don’t just wake up one day and think “gee, I’m really tired of this anxiety, so I’m just going to get rid of it.” My anxiety can vary from day to day, sometimes letting me be almost normal, and then, like a tsunami, it crushes me and I feel different.

There are many levels to my anxiety, and I’ve realized they are all related. Perhaps I have had it all my life, but it manifested in a different form until my brain suddenly couldn’t take it anymore. It was like a switch flipped in my brain, changing my “fight or flight” response from mostly fight to just flight. That was the change in 2016, shifting my frustrations from creating anger, which often makes me feel empowered, to feeling the need to hide.

There are three main emotions that come with my anxiety: anger, anxiousness, and depression.

Anger

My anger is much more than simply being mad at something. Some days it’s subtle, a general frustration at the world and everyone in it. The eye roll at the stupidity of mankind and the sigh of irritation at the annoying questions from others. It isn’t that something — or someone — makes me angry…