THE ANXIETY OF BECOMING THE UNKNOWN
When you are an overthinker like I was, you’d probably have imagined your whole life — from the beginning to the end and top to bottom — in a thousand different scenarios. You have probably imagined yourself leaping over and navigating all the hurdles of existence successfully in those different scenarios. Maybe with a little friction, but definitely, no one fails or dies in their own story. So in your fantasies you are a cat. You have nine lives. And even more if you care to dream them up.
If you are a recovering overthinker like me, and a christian to boot, then there is a different dimension to the narrative. Even as there is an occasional urge to run into your mind and address all the possible outcomes and have ready solutions beforehand, you understand the futility of trying to control everything.
No one. Absolutely no one can correctly predict the next moment. A sequence of events can strongly suggest a certain outcome, but we have all seen life enough to know that things don’t always turn out as expected.
Here we are, knowing with hairline-ripping certainty that no matter how much of a control freak we are, things are never in our control. You didn’t create you, you didn’t piece you together, so you cannot just decide to engineer things your way. At this stage, it is arguably frightening.
Being an overthinker comes with many perks, including anxiety. Anything ranging from mild, shake-it-off-now anxiety to hair-raising, sweat-breaking, pupil-dilating anxiety.
In many ways, I think anxiety is a reaction to finally realizing that you really don’t have control over your life. Unexpected events, annoying people, sudden assignments and class tests, money crisis, and so on, can put a dent in your carefully planned life.
I think it gets even worse if you find yourself in a place where you are responsible for another person too. With anxiety riding up to eye level on my case, I find myself saying and thinking things…how do you parents do it? How do you deliberately get pregnant, knowing that you are going to care for that child for a very long time? How do y’all get married and start to obligatorily worry if another human being has eaten or not? How do y’all commit to more responsibility? Is love really that blind?
Responsibility. That’s the elephant in the room. With increased responsibility, you are in charge of, or at least responsible for a person or thing, in a world where the next moment isn’t even certain. Wow. If you had to worry all day that circumstances could ruin your seemingly perfect life plan, and now you have to make a perfect life plan for another person, how much anxiety would that be?
A lot. A whole lot. The idea of not having control only fuels anxiety, and knowing that the same goes for those under your care, there is a cause for alarm.
Anxiety also presents itself in our prospects and perceived future. Whatever we would become, especially if it places us in a somewhat leadership role, or puts something of value in our care. It could be people’s money, children, a business, an organization, a country, etc. Knowing that your uncertainty about the future would not matter if you fail in tending to what you have been entrusted with, a wave of frantic worry could settle on you.
Does worrying about what you can’t change, change anything? Which of you by worrying can change a hair on your head from black to white? Why can’t I stop worrying? What if I fail? Everyone is looking up to me, and I can’t afford to stumble even for a moment…
I have found that it is also nothing short of crazy to tell a flesh and blood human not to worry at all. Why, there’s a lot of things to worry about, and even more things are queuing up, waiting patiently to be worried over. The basic human instinct is to survive, and a problem without a permanent or lasting solution poses a threat to survival. So if we must tackle anxiety, we must gives ourselves a solution to the reason we are reacting anxiously.
God and creation is like an author and a book. The characters have no way of knowing what will become of them in the end or how they came to be in the first place. The only one who knows the end from the beginning is the author. So does God.
So since God knows it all, and knows what we ought to be and how we would get there, it is only wise to seek His counsel to know what to do and where to go.
So there you have it, a tested and trusted cure to your anxieties. Get on your knees and whisper, “which way, God?”
There is a humbling element in this question, and a meek admission that you cannot function by yourself, and so you’ll ask God. And He will give His answer, because He delights in humble submission. The response you get might not make sense to you when weighed by the standards of human logic, but you will do it anyway. Hasn’t the unpredictability of life taught us enough to know that human logic holds no real candle to the real issues?
So to be foolproof even in our state of vulnerable humanness, we must first learn to trust. To trust blindly. It is in our blindness that we see the most clearly.
So take a leap today, yeah? Either ways, you don’t know what would happen, but with God, you are with the One who knows it all. It is impossible to be misguided in such a position.
You can never not properly become, when you follow who know road.
Selah.
