Leanne's Guide to Anxiety

Do you have anxiety?

Well, you’re not alone. I do too. Everyone has at least a little bit.

Mine can get pretty wild sometimes. It’s taught me a lot, but it's also kept me from living my life to the fullest. That's why my new years resolution for 2022 is to combat my anxiety head-on.

First off, I'm going to find the sources of my anxiety.

"If it isn't worth the pain, you have every right to throw it away."

That's a line from a song I wrote when I was fifteen.

If I find a source of my anxiety is something that doesn't benefit me at all and is something that I can get rid of without causing myself additional pain, I will take my younger self's advice and gladly throw it away. And when I do, I'm going to remind myself that I should not feel guilty because in the end, I'm doing what’s best for myself and my mental health.

If a source of my anxiety is something that I need to do or keep in order to have a better life or if it's something I can't get rid of without facing harm, I am going to have to change the way I think. After-all, anxiety is a product of one's thoughts.

I've come up with a little saying: act, convince, believe, become.

For example, if you are afraid of meeting new people, you have to:

ACT like you don’t care what others think/like you are cool, calm, and collected/like you are excited

CONVINCE yourself that it's true

BELIEVE that, and play the game

BECOME fearless

Looking at anxiety as something that you have to get rid of makes it seem like an impossible task and will make you feel even more hopeless.

Take the movie The Babadook for example. In the film, a woman and her son face a dangerous demon. The mother goes crazy because she refuses to believe it's real, though it continues to bother her. It takes the form of her deceased husband. Her son isn’t affected by the demon as he acknowledges its existence, and he doesn’t fight it. It isn’t until the end of the movie that the mother realizes that once she acknowledges the demon, she can see that the demon isn’t as bad as she thought it was and understand why its there, and she can tame it fearlessly. The Babadook represents depression and the moral of the story can be applied to all mental illnesses.

I’ve had anxiety for as long as I can remember, but 2021 marks the seventh year of me actually acknowledging that I have it. Before then, I just thought that there was something wrong with me, and I hated myself for it. This allowed it to manifest in new and unfortunate ways. The past seven years have been very hard, but I no longer look at anxiety as a flaw. It is not something I have to get rid of. It is a part of me, and I am not afraid of it. Now, I just need to continue developing healthy coping mechanisms so that I can learn how to coexist with it.

In the movie, the demon is never killed. If they killed the Babadook, they would be killing a manifestation of the memory of the woman’s husband. Instead, they took care of it and kept it under control – so it could live on but not hurt them.

You can’t fight your anxiety or depression. You can't kill it. It is a part of you. If you try to hurt it, you hurt yourself. You have to take care of it instead, as you would take care of any part of yourself.

I've gotten through the first step of acknowleding anxiety instead of fighting it. Now, I must complete the second and last step: I must think of anxiety as a part of me that I can’t get rid of, and I must nurture it. Instead of being harsh on myself, I will do positive things that help me cope.

Anxiety is horrible. However, you can’t hate yourself for having it because in the end it is just an exaggerated response to stimuli. It’s normal to be nervous when you’re facing the unknown. Accept the fear. The fight against the anxiety is just as troubling as the anxiety itself.

Here’s a little something I learned from the motion picture The Duff:

BELIEVE it happened yesterday.

RETRIEVE your confidence.

ACHIEVE your dreams.

My take:

I’ve forced myself to not give a rat's butt about 80% of things and my life has become so much better. I would never say it's perfect, but nerve-racking things don't bother me like they used to. I experience stress and anxiety, but I don't let them infiltrate me or consume me like the Babadook did before it was acknowledged and nurtured.

It’s all about confidence -- and I don't mean the confidence to go out and do some big spectacular thing -- I mean the confidence you have in yourself to trust that life will always work out the way it should, no matter what happens.