This morning, I woke up around 6:30am. Anxiety levels were high, and I found worries of the future drifting through my brain. My sleep, as far as the morning was concerned anyway, was finished.
Fears like this can be the worst, because they can paralyze you, while screaming that you have to act, to do something to save yourself.
That may sound dramatic, but as someone who suffers from chronic anxiety, I can tell you, it’s quite appropriate.
The rational mind is rarely your friend when such moments come – all too often, we find ourselves constructing arguments in defence of our fears, providing them with further fuel and justification.
We “should” be reminding ourselves of why those fears are nothing but the product of a neurotic mind, endless defending itself against threats that ceased to be real soon after graduating from childhood. Most of the time, anyway.
As an owner of a dance studio once told me: “It’s easy to think of reasons why you can’t do something. Think of some reasons why you can.” Doing so creates momentum in the opposite direction. And at critical moments, a little positive momentum can be all you need.
Still, the fears exist, and they sure seem real. On the surface, or not far below, there’s the fear of failure, of disappointing others. A fear of not being good enough, or deserving enough.
There may be fears of being cursed, or broken. Growing up with ADD in an unsympathetic school environment, it certainly felt like that for me at times.
Deeper down, there’s fears of not being able to HANDLE success. We may be afraid that we will sabotage ourselves, because on some level, we’ve grown too used to a level of mediocrity, like the caged tiger who, when freed, still refused to move more than ten paces in any direction. The cage was in its mind.
But deepest of all, I think, is the fear of giving in to the part of us that wants to go numb and live the easy, humdrum life, because the stretching upwards just hurts so damn much, and who can say that success is guaranteed?
Here’s something I keep learning though, and SOMEDAY I swear, it’s gonna stick: We have an ability to adapt, that goes beyond anything we can imagine. Some parts of ourselves seem to weather any change, and continue to plague us for years, long after other unhelpful habits have been conquered.
After a while, we may feel those parts of ourselves are set in stone, immutable. They define our limits, the boundary at which it seems we will never reach beyond.
Which makes it all the more beautiful when, one unexpected day, we do.
Those moments are beautiful, because they shatter, in one moment, an entire host of reasoning built around why things can never change, never grow, in the direction we most need to. We come to realize that those parts of ourselves were never fixed, just stuck, and needing just a little wiggling to break free.
So, after resigning myself to getting up, the first thing I did was sit in front of my computer and start working on my latest track. And as I worked and things moved forward, I felt a loosening within. The anxiety gradually faded away, to be replaced by the quiet satisfaction that only comes from getting out of the way and doing the work.
That satisfaction is how I know I’m on the right path. Perhaps it’s the only feeling truly worth following.
Credits:
‘An Interior of a Restroom’ by Max Vakhtbovych from Pexels