maybe we are brave

There are some days where my anxiety destroys me. It takes a rather benign action and twists it into something that feels all-consuming.

My mind spins this narrative that paints me as the devil incarnate and it’s debilitating. The only way to escape is to try to focus on literally anything else, but my brain obsesses over that one thing.

Maybe it was a five-second interaction. Maybe it was not waving back to a complete stranger. Maybe it was something I said that I didn’t really mean. Maybe it was a post, a story, a photo, a description that now I feel impossibly insecure about. Or maybe it’s trying to remember if I turned off the heater before I left the house.

But now, it’s all I can think about. All I want to do is FIX it! However, fixing it, is usually the last thing you should do. Because unless your friends already know exactly how you think, texting them about an offhanded comment you made four hours ago isn’t ideal. In fact, it’s probably a comment that they already completely forgot.

And sometimes you can’t fix it; short of running after the stranger apologizing profusely for not returning their wave and yelling at them, “I hope you have a wonderful day!”. Thankfully I have never actually done that, but honestly, sometimes my anxiety wants me to.

So you sit with it; you stew, you take deep breaths, and you journal. You reach out to the people you love and trust to get their take on it. You put on your favorite music and you do your very best to move forward. And you hope that you have some time before it strikes again.

We all care to some degree about what people think of us, even if we just want to be known as the mysterious hermit, but anxiety takes it to another level and it’s hard. Sometimes it’s miserable. It takes a lot of bravery every day to go about life knowing your anxiety is lurking and then interacting and existing anyway.

I don’t think we give enough credit to ourselves. In fact, I know we don’t. Because when I think about bravery I don’t think about my trip to the grocery store. I think of heroes and people who are literally risking their lives for a better world, and yes, those people are incredibly brave, but maybe we are too.