Something about anxiety

This is a post I wrote many months ago and haven’t wanted to publish. But now I am doing it anyway.

Btw. We now have a home and are not homeless anymore. After six months of not having our own place to go to sleep at night. Here comes the post:

Being evicted from our home and having been homeless for the past month has shown us how important it is to have a network and true friends. Our network, for a long time, has been quite limited.

This is probably a result of my inability to connect; really and truly connect, on an emotional as well as a practical level. I have a very hard time creating a kind of connectivity where the friendship and relationship means more than just a form of recreation. Relationships where the way you are with that person or those people is a true form of yourself, a real human being, with all its imperfections.

I have had these friendships before. However, it has been a long time since I was able to fully relax in a relationship of that kind. The problem, as I see it, is that I am not able to create solid boundaries. I am unsure if this is because I don’t know my boundaries or if it is because I am afraid of rejection. It could be both. I often find myself cornered by things that happen quickly without me really understanding how they happened and then not being able to backtrack or to put a stop to actions I don’t agree with. This is how friendships usually start to deteriorate. All relationships actually. When communication stagnates and people are afraid to talk about how they truly feel.

Lately I have come to think that maybe these moments when you are truly yourself are very rare. Because people are generally not themselves. They are a kind of awkward piece of themselves that could be much more alive if only they had the feeling that being themselves was great. Not just okay, but great.

My anxiety, in one aspect, keeps me from being real. In other words I am afraid to be me. Afraid that other people are going to judge the way I feel about things; I spend a great deal of time trying to avoid situations where I have to assert my boundaries. Instead I try to only interact with people on a very shallow level, where I don’t have to say ‘no’ or be dissatisfied with something. This form of interaction can never be very deep. It is one aspect of being, but it isn’t the whole package. What is missing is all the ways you are vulnerable and all the ways you may not be sure of yourself. This manifests as the inability to set boundaries for yourself. I have read a few articles about how the inability to set boundaries affect people. When you are not confident enough to set boundaries you will probably not always be fully aware of other people’s boundaries, this isn’t necessarily the case, but it can be. Also, you will rarely have the energy to be able to help others who might be in need of your help. When you are busy trying to stay afloat you wont be able to keep others afloat either.

There are several reasons why repressing some parts of yourself all the time may not be a healthy way of communicating. First, it isn’t satisfactory, it leaves you feeling kind of empty, second, it leaves a deep feeling of neglect inside of you that I think is a symptom of never being able to be true to your own needs and emotions. I have wondered for a while how I am ever going to learn to be authentic, I mean, if I don’t know how by now, how am I going to learn it? How am I going to teach it to my child?

Amidst the chaos of having no home to call our own I have been granted a mentor. I am supposed to do a course in mindfulness, and, whereas I can definitely see a lot of great tools of mindfulness, at the same time learning mindfulness now doesn’t seem to be a real solution to my anxiety. Rather, it feels like yet another thing I have accepted to do at the bidding of someone else. Where am I in all of this?

My anxiety, because it makes me feel unsafe in all situations where other people are involved, has taught me lots of strategies of avoiding having to be myself. These strategies have made me avoid all situations that directly involved being honest about my own emotions. They have caused me to repress my self. And I have now come to a place where I am not sure who I really am. I have travelled so far from my self that I am afraid I can’t find my way back.

I don’t see how mindfulness is going to help me.

On top of this I am experiencing an increase in anger. The angry emotion creeps up on me and grabs my chest and my stomach in a tight grip that feels at the same time hot and cold. In trying to escape it it grows within me and fills me with disgust, contempt, and sadness. These are all aspects of my fear. The gnawing, never ending fear of not being good enough, the fear of looking other people in the eye. The fear of being myself.

All of these feelings and thoughts are part of a cycle that I have been moving through for as long as I can remember now. The frustrating thing is that I am seemingly incapable of changing this cycle. My ego has become so used to taking on the role of victim or passive onlooker that I think I wont be able to act. And so I am stuck in the position of passivity. I keep imagining other scenarios, where I am able to express myself and to keep a simple conversation going without worrying which direction it is going to take and where it will end up. I wish I could at least be better at taking time to think about my words before I answer anybody’s questions or demands.