Enduring through anxiety:

take your day in bite-sized pieces

I’ve got no idea how to cure my anxiety.

This wasn’t something I struggled widely with until my last two years of college. All my life, I’ve been performing in front of people. If you can do that, people say, you probably don’t have an overabundance of anxiety.

I was a dancer, an instrumentalist, an actress, an athlete. I have performed in front of crowds since I was five years old. If asked, I can still present any topic at the drop of a hat. I’ll gladly give a speech instead of take a test.

But send that email? Hell no. Answer the phone? Call my friend? Just the suggestion makes my heart quicken.

I have no idea why. I have no idea how I got to be this way. And I have no idea how to cure my anxiety.

I’m currently experimenting with medicine (doctor prescribed — please don’t self-medicate), and I really can’t tell if things are working. It takes time. The downer was making me sloth-like, so we added an upper. The upper makes me jittery and anxious. And we’re back to square one.

While we’re figuring all of this out, I have to go on with my life. This means sending emails, making phone calls, attending meetings… the horror.

The struggle is real. Genuinely. I woke up yesterday morning with the standard thought of “oh God, I don’t want to be here. I do not know how I’m going to make it through the week”… and then I paused, and came to a revelation.

I didn’t have to make it through the entire week. I don’t even need to make it through the day. I just needed to make it past 10am — a meeting.

And (wouldn’t you know it) I did. The next goal was 4:30pm. Then 7pm. Just little checkpoints.

Today I started my day with this mindset: I don’t need to make it through the day. I just need to get to work. I just need to make it until 8am.

It sucks. It’s so shitty. It’s such a low goal. I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel to reach for any speck of motivation. In lieu of actually finding genuine motivation, I’ll settle for endurance.

It’s 2pm. My next checkpoint is 3:30pm. I think I can do it.