Your Anxiety Is Telling You Where Your New Strengths Lie

Your anxiety is telling you where your new strengths lie.

When I was at uni I would often walk into the campus library with my rucksack all packed with the day's study materials, find the nearest available computer to sit at, and just stare at the screen blankly for what felt like 2 hours, but was probably closer to 30 minutes. Occasionally I'd scroll through the day's news and current affairs headlines before preparing to head home, feeling like a total fraud, and an embarrassment to my friends and family, who had such high hopes for me.

The dark void I carried around in my chest, a black hole from which all light was unable to escape, would begin pulling my vacant heart down, as I sat on the bus back towards my halls of residence, wishing to never arrive. All attempts to prevent my heart from free-falling through self-administered pep talks, always failing - making the rushes of despair and the urge to sabotage myself beyond all repair increasingly alluring. Open planned libraries were the worst. It felt as though the only direction safe for me to look in without being stripped naked by the scrutinizing gazes of my fellow students was at the floor. But what do you expect when you're smoking tons of weed every single day!!!

That period of my life I think was bordering on full on depression to be honest, and I was only able to feel sad about the state I was in long after I'd begun to get better. Sadness, for me, feels like a temporary sense of loss for something, and so I didn't feel sad for myself at the time because I didn't have anything left I could lose.

In order to stave the ominous pull of depression manifesting, I feel like sometimes people just have to throw themselves without thinking into the deep end of their current anxieties - against the wishes of their protesting ego, in order to realise that they do actually possess the strength of will to overcome the adversity they are in or soon must face.

A lot of my anxiety over the years has stemmed precisely from not wanting to realise this fact - from not wanting to find out if I would sink or swim should I decide to take it on. I would cling to the delusion that by choosing to remain in limbo, in a state of perpetual inaction via the means of procrastination - by refusing to enter into a confrontation with my anxiety, I could stay protected from its debilitating effects. But what ended up happening was the complete opposite to what I'd hoped for. The anxiety created by denying that I needed to take action simply lay dormant within me - silently growing in its intensity, until eventually becoming a new, and even more corrosive source of anxiety which dwarfed the original.

FFS!!!

Thankfully, after thousands of failures, denials and refusals to act, I began to accept the lesson which had been staring at me all along. The best way in which I could become stronger was by flipping the script about what anxiety actually means to me. Anxiety is simply a signal informing me where I must apply myself next. And I'm finding that the rewards from conquering the challenges that confront me when I locate its origin always outweigh any benefits I thought I would have obtained had my anxiety decided one day to magically fuck off and disappear forever!

Anxiety is like a loot box in a computer game, in the sense that if you dare to smash it, you get rewarded with additional life skills, weapons and bonus health to aid you on your quest, because you dared to take the risk. And it's all for free too!!!

And so the more anxieties you have, the more potential strengths there are for you to acquire. You just have to take the plunge, and build up your plunge taking muscles over time. Don't think too much. Just leap into your anxiety and start kicking its pathetic little ass as soon as your feet touch the ground!  

Nothing good ever comes from trying to avoid things that are located inside your head because wherever you go the bastard just keeps following you around! Anxiety and shadows have a lot in common in this sense.