Hello Anxiety, My Old Friend
One of my dearest friends is a recovering alcoholic with 27 years of sobriety under her belt. This is how she describes her drinking: “I was having fun. And then I wasn’t.”
This is how I feel about my anxiety. It was working well for me. And then it wasn’t.
There’s a case to be made about the value of anxiety. The human race descends from anxious people. Let’s say an early man was traipsing across the savannah and came across a pride of lions. A relaxed human would blink. Anxious ones would get the hell out of there. Guess whose descendants we are? The ones that recognized danger. Ditto on weird smelling food, raging rivers and whatever else they faced. Anxious people were survivors.
Fast forward to the current day. Few of us are threatened by wild animals. But anxiety still serves a purpose.
Being alert to danger is self-protective, whether it’s the menacing-looking guy getting too close on the subway or the mysterious lump that has suddenly appeared in your arm pit. But anxiety also works in less dramatic ways. For me, anxiety was great for my professional career. It teased performance. As someone who worked on deadlines, the stress of running out of time was a great motivator. Worried I could be replaced always forced me to do the best possible job I could. Worrying about money forced me to hustle, which brought me…
