anxiety
i mostly grew up thinking that chronic anxiety was something that happened to other people. I was pretty shy with strangers and garbage at public speaking for most of my childhood, but a persistent undercurrent of “what if???” was thankfully absent.
so it feels strange now for worries to plague me even in my sleep. in the three days before my first visa interview, because I’d prepared my own documents without a lawyer, there was not a single time i woke up feeling like I’d shut my eyes. selling myself on the job market made me so locked into finding the “right” answer to every question that I found myself panicking whenever friends asked me for my thoughts. it is so crazy-making to have your body respond to “how have you been” like it’s a test.
so either this is just another case of “expanded awareness makes you feel like you have more problems” or I actually have more problems, but probably both. it’s so annoying!!! I can feel the self-sabotage happening when I try to tune the exact amount of irony and disclosure and humility to make this stranger like me, but trying to stop is like trying to prevent a wheel of cheese from rolling down a hill but the cheese is bigger than you and now you are rolling too and everyone is looking at you like why are you doing that but obviously you cannot just stop rolling now. ow.
𓇢𓆸
my life for the past few years has been marked by longish stretches of stress, demarcated by short blips of also-stressful vacation or an occasional loosening where I think I’ve fixed myself.
during one of the peaceful times, I took a trip by myself, five hours each way by train, on a route pressed right up against the ocean. I’d just read a bunch of blog posts about how good conversations have lots of doorknobs, how people love to interact with responsive people, how everyone can be so interesting so long as you are curious.
and I don’t think I’ve ever fully gotten over my shyness, so this was out of character, but on both legs of the trip I had a long, meaningful conversation with the stranger next to me. one of them told me after that he hadn’t talked so long in forever, and I’d pretty much drawn out his entire life story.
to be clear i don’t really endorse optimizing for becoming the best listener ever. because then you’re not really showing up, yourself, you’re just a pump. but i think there’s something to be said here for how at peace i felt in that interaction. what i mean is,
a great way to be okay with yourself is to let yourself disappear, i think. it’s probably kind of cheating, like at some point you actually have to come to terms with the facts of your existence. maybe the final boss for me is to look myself squarely in the eye and make actual judgements, and accept that it is okay for me to exist in the state that i am, because i’m already here.
but in the meantime, everything that’s worked for me has been in the flavour of losing myself a bit. getting lost in a book, in making art, or trying to absorb the truth value of both of us being particles and there being no real line between you and me. buddha said that he saved no beings, because there are no selves.
because everyone is just you, pushed out. we live in the same egg. there’s nothing to worry about.