Happiness and Anxiety Aren’t Mutually Exclusive
I gripped the handle on my Uber’s door and eased into the backseat of an air conditioned Camry. It was close to 1am, he was picking me up on the corner of west 12th, and I was thankful.
My feet hurt and my friends had just slid into the back of their own uber.
I looked down at my phone at the same moment that he looked at me through his rear view mirror, “You seem happy. Did you have a good night?”
I hadn’t noticed that I’d been smiling, but that’s true to anything we do often — we don’t feel how it takes over because it becomes a part of who we are.
“Yeah, a really good night,” I said.
A couple of months ago I was telling a different story. There are scars in my mind that are still healing after a particularly difficult Mother’s Day and a poorly timed argument with a friend.
The dark spaces I’d known before May were never of my own creation. Circumstances around me forced me into hospital corners and 6th floor chapels, praying for strength because praying for their life was no longer an option.
But never have I been on my knees and staring down into a hole that I’d just finished pushing my old self into.
The hollowness of a place devoid of life and drenched in grief makes you pinch yourself often: a feeble attempt at reminding yourself that you can still feel. But in it, you still know your name. The spaces are empty and you feel broken, but you still know how many pieces the puzzle holds. Even if it means knowing how many are now missing.
But for all the ways I know how to wrestle with loss and I know how to survive alone, I just didn’t know how to stand up to the girl in the mirror when she’s lost hold of who she is.
Knowing the depths of your own pain makes it difficult to feel comfortable in your own happiness. It feels like either one or the other must be a lie because how can both be you?
Except they are.
For a long time I’ve always imagined my own anxiety and depression as my buddies for the carpool lane. The kinds who would eventually get out. I envisioned getting to a red light, stopping for a couple of seconds, them jumping out of the car and me hitting the gas at green without looking back.
A good drive-away song would play as the soundtrack for this majestic moment and I would suddenly no longer have panic attacks or be triggered by words like “obligation” or “aspiration.”
The biggest flaw in that plan isn’t that I don’t know how to drive, it’s that my buddies don’t exist outside of me, they’re added limbs.
I’d need to hate and remove parts of myself just to arrive at the illusion that they’ve ceased to exist.
And I can confirm that even when you sit still in that level of self-loathing all you ever get close to is an illusion. It’s equal parts disappointing and freeing.
With every piece you strip away for the sake of influencing someone else’s perception of you, you realize that you’re only creating more emotional distance for yourself.
The exchange rate is unsustainably high.
I know because I’d been operating under this premise since May. I’d ignored the strength that comes from being able to tell my own stories. I’d leaned away from caring the way I care for fear that it would trigger the use of a word that would trigger the downward spiral I didn’t want to repeat.
I was the one who jumped out of the car in that metaphor. I stayed back on the curb, as the red light turned to green and the car took off without me.
So now I’m walking instead of driving. My pace is slower, but more intentional.
I’m deliberately pacing myself and getting to know who I am in the aftermath of some hard times. The girl I see in the mirror, reflected back in my selfies, that’s a girl I like.
She’s empowered and comfortable in her own skin. She’s learning to speak loud enough to be heard by others and is okay with the bit of fear that lives alongside every proclamation of her thoughts and ideas.
The world grows fidgety when an individual doesn’t fit into a certain box. Suddenly it loses hold of the narrative that you’re supposed to fit into and it’s forced to pay attention.
Make it hard for the world to ignore you. Push that one guy past his go-to lines and fallback conversations, and challenge him to challenge you. Smile at the uber drive and know that, yeah, you are happy and yeah, you did have a good night.
Understand that you can be the same girl who had a panic attack on Monday and partied with her friends on Saturday. Because I know that’s who I am.
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I’m the founder of toodamnyoung.com. I’m a writer, editor and entrepreneur. You can find my personal essays on Medium + other writing on MTV, Forbes and Popsugar Latina. I also co-host Creating Espacios, a Forbes Podcast.
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