This is What Anxiety Looks Like
If you’re thinking these thoughts, they’re not real.
I suffered from acute anxiety towards the end of my freshman year of college. I discovered that what I thought was universally-shared opinion about morals ethics, well, wasn’t, which forced me to reckon with my own values as a human. That interim period of cognitive dissonance was sufferable, because before I realized that it was other people whose morals were askew, I thought there was something wrong with me. I felt like I’d somehow missed learning up from down and right from wrong, and because of that I didn’t trust myself. You’ll see that in these words. Thankfully, throughout the rest of college it was reconciled, on the whole.
Now I look back on this and realize it was completely anxiety talking. It plagued and colored my thoughts. If you’re thinking thoughts like this, 99% of getting over anxiety is realizing that it’s just the anxiety talking, your worries aren’t based in logical reality. And most importantly, know that you will come out of it one day, and look back and chuckle at how irrational you once were.
2.25.15
This is probably really weird to start writing out my feelings like this but I know that when I write things out, I tend to somehow solidify and thoroughly “delineate” my feelings and thoughts through my head. C just got back from meeting Jake. She’s got a boyfriend and three-four guys on the side. It sucks to be around on my own for four weeks and have not a single option. I don’t need to feels sorry for myself because I know I’m better than that, but am I? And I wish I could somehow write this as well spoken as Lorelei or Professor Nagel, two brilliant people. I want to be able to write or to research or to market incredibly and be really good at something. I’m so average and maybe too self-conscious but that’s really what I believe. I think I’m probably mentally insane with some anxiety or depressive disorder. I’m not chronically anxious or depressed, but I feel jealous. And I’m not a jealous person I’m not or maybe I’m just telling myself that I’m not when I really am a chronically jealous person. But I think chronically jealous people (I’m using the word “chronically” too much) are never happy with themselves ever. I used to be happy with myself in high school. Was I a high school peaker? I fucking hope not; I was happy, not particularly popular or successful but happy. And now I’m learning and feeling intellectually challenged and expanded yet frustrated because I’m told you’re not meant to start sentences with the word “and,” but I like starting sentences with the word and. It’s like the latch between two cars on my mile long train of thought.
I want to swim in the mornings. I don’t want my arms to get too big. I want to be skinnier. I want to be healthier. Maybe I am jealous. Why is it that when I think about writing this I think about having it found by some obscure publisher who will make me famous. WHY DO I CARE? I care because I want to be great. I want to be exceptional and I want people to look up to me. But people who want other people to look up to them never end up actually having anyone look up to them. I am egocentric and self obsessed. Maybe I’m still just a self conscious teenager, maybe it’s a personality flaw.
I want to be happy for her. And I am, maybe. It just fucking sucks to be caught where I am. I hate this person who is typing because I don’t like feeling jealous or upset (duh), I just want to be loved by someone who is a)hot, b)has a personality c)cares about me, d)has something to fucking say). How is it that I am in a city with three million people, 1.5 of which are suitable (i.e. male) for me, and I can’t seem to find one person. Ugh fuck me I’m so fucking pathetic. Why can’t I be like Beyonce, a “strong independent woman”? I used to tell myself that when I ran track. High school is easy when there is only 200 people and you’re one of the prettiest. How in the world do people deal with getting older, deal with getting uglier? Fuck I can’t believe I just said that, but when they do it’s okay because they’ve found someone who loves them so looks stop mattering.
I can’t even get my thoughts out quick enough. I am having an existential crisis and I don’t really know what that means, and I feel stupid for not knowing what that means. Fuck you, Joseph from Harvard for telling me not to use “and” too many times in one sentence. I will use “and” as many times as I damn well please. Why can’t I go to Harvard? Why can’t I be exceptional. That’s what it is: I just want to feel exceptional in something –whether its aesthetics, academics, artistry or craftsmanship, speaking skills, something. It’s rough when youre always told how exceptional you are, and then get plunged into a world where there are a million more people even more exceptional than you. But then again I suppose its much worse if you’re not told that at all.
I want to be well spoken. I want to be able to think through complex things like what an education is and have a real fucking opinion. I want to knock down the brick wall in my head when people ask me hard questions. It’s the same wall that obstructs me from choosing the right fucking word when I want to, as well. When I speak I sound like an idiot because I spend thirty seconds trying to sound eloquent, loose my train of thought, and I ultimately just end up sounding like a moron who took too long to say something quite basic and elementary.
I want to be happy for other people because I know that when you’re happy for other people, they’ll be happy for you. It’s a positive cycle. But it’s a brick wall that’s stopping me again.
The only sledgehammer to this iron curtain between East and West Germany (East being the part of me that is selfish and stupid and West being the side of me who is eloquent, liberated, and confident (I am the granddaughter of an avid anti-communist, Vietnam veteran)) will be a boyfriend who loves me and reassures me. But that’s stupid because the kind of boyfriend who could do that wouldn’t be the kind that would want me when I can’t do it on my own.
Why don’t words like “impoverished” be the ones that fall into my head from the sky? I want to write but I don’t think I’m good enough; neither as a thinker or an academic nor as a writer. And I would think (again, Fuck You Joseph) that maybe it’s just my age, perhaps I’m not old enough or experienced enough, that Lorelei and Professor Nagel are so well spoken because they have thirty years and a PhD on me. But skinny little Carlianne can do it. The Almighty Stephanie can do it. Why can’t I? Do I have catching up to do? Are they ahead of me in reading and experience in a place that I could ever even catch up to? Or are they born with a natural talent, where together we run around in circles separated by a metal rod, whose length and solid permanence will always keep them ten feet in front of me?
Why can’t I be one of those incredible people who work fifty plus hours a week, eat salad with tuna and eggs and raw broccoli and like it, and who actually have the self discipline not only to get up early, but also to venture out in the frigid and biting cold, just to approach near freezing like a popsicle. What species, form of superhuman, are those Lululemon-clad creatures? And I mean the real ones, not the ones who pretend to have all their shit together but really were cheating on their husbands the night before simply to wake up with sore and red vaginas, and are working out in an attempt to either a) assuage their guilt or b) elicit an amnesia of sorts to their aching genitals by vigorously working another muscle (it’s about time, huh?)
Fuck me, its 12:11 AM and I still have two pages to write about this Italian opera book reading, a reading of which I’ve only read 50/134 pages. Fuck.
Am I meant to feel better after this? Is my writing out of this like a therapy session that I’m always weary of attending? I suppose I feel a little better, certainly like my heart and general chest cavity has unknotted some of those knickers, which previously were in a dangerously uncomfortable twist. I should probably talk about this with someone. But this is good for now.
Cookoo
I know that Cookoo is what people say in Belgium when they walk in the door but I always thought it was cool and wanted to say it. I always forget when I actually walk in the door so I’ll just use it as an “arvoir” or “sianara” of sorts.
Cookoo,
Ay dawg
