I Took One Year To Heal And Got Two Promising Years Of My Life

How anxiety turned into progress

Change doesn’t work like a countdown | Image by the author

It started with a thought.

“I don’t want to be a chicken anymore. I need to be stronger.”

To teach my kids resilience, I had to have it. I blamed years-long apprehension for destroying my health and restricting my life. For decades, I was running away from daily frustrations into shopping, falling in love, planning the future, and everything 20- and 30-somethings usually do.

But it didn’t help much. The suspense was still there, and I hated it.

I can’t say I made no progress in all those years. I overcame my worst fears, but every new problem drained me, and I felt like a helpless victim hit by the capricious waves of life.

Then came the early forties, and I turned into my kids’ assistant, a waspish mother in stained clothes with a dirty house. I had no village to ease the stress, no job, no free time, and no aim. Only worry, exasperation, and the need to do something before they left the nest and made me redundant. But I was too scared of any move.

One day, my friend Phil suggested therapy:

“You may have some emotional baggage, coming from such an unstable region”, he remarked in his polite British way.