The Anxiety Waiting Room
I threw myself down on a floor I’ve hardly ever trusted as clean enough to set my purse on. The need to vomit does that to you — with reckless abandon, even the most anal of Clorox-huffing neat freaks will drop to their knees in a swamp if it means bile will make contact with only the inside of the commode.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been visited by the invisible monster. Like something out of The X-Files, I am made ill by a faceless fiend — something no one can see — including myself. I’m given physical symptoms by something that never actually touched me. And like an unpolished relative, this brute drops in and overstays his welcome: putting his dirty shoes on my coffee table and expecting me to drop everything and prepare him a four-course meal.
I’ve never been one to feel that one must choose God or choose science. The two aren’t mutually exclusive to me and that’s that. My problem then is knowing that for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. My reaction is nausea, discomfort, vomiting, sweating, dizziness. But being a God-fearing woman of science, I can’t for anything figure out the action. I can’t find the location, the nature of it, the context even in which it occurred baffles me.
This morning, I was laughing hard and real and pure, training someone at my job, literally teaching someone to do what I do best. And this afternoon, I had to let my roommate pick me up from an urgent care because I was afraid to drive. I sat in the waiting room, enduring wave upon wave of discomfort and dark thoughts hit me and feeling so weak from my body’s response to fear that I could’ve slid right out of the chair.
My God, is the rest of my life just a waiting room between visits with anxiety? I feel I’m perpetually waiting for an aneurysm to rupture — the kind that doesn’t kill you, but also isn’t quickly forgotten.
So, my mute monster: are you hiding behind my next laugh? Just beyond the thrill of my next first date? Where are you lurking, and why on earth are you after me?
I have to express that the portion written above was penned in the midst of an anxiety attack that lasted for a few days. I refused to write a conclusion until I was well out of that head space, because now, today, I can tell you that I’m okay. I am really okay.
The best advice I can give to anyone going through something similar — and not that it’s always a cure-all — is to evaluate your environments. Take a deeper look at your home life, your work space, your relationships (romantic and platonic alike). Although these mental health issues may always run through me the way water eases through a fjord, it’s entirely possible to have situational anxiety or depression. Cultivate environments that set you up for good mental health and be absolutely ruthless in regards to who and what you’ll allow into those environments.
