Anxiety
You know how good friends will tell you if you have something in your teeth? Well the thing I had in my teeth was clinical anxiety, and it took twenty-six years for one of my friends to tell me.
My friends also never told me that I don’t have an inside voice, or that when I’m searching the house for something, I look like a T.rex.
All my friends thought all my other friends already told me I was weird. To say nothing of how the people who brought me into this world and kept me there for 18 years should have perhaps said something.
“The thing I had in my teeth was clinical anxiety.”
I would never have known I had anxiety if not for the pandemic. I was telling people how social distancing in grocery stores didn’t affect how I shopped: My whole life I always refused to turn down an aisle if more than a single person was already in it. And how, if someone was standing in front of the pasta I wanted, I pretended to be extremely interested in the adjacent pudding until that person left. I couldn’t fathom asking them to move.
I always went out of my way to avoid people. And instead of nodding in agreement, all of my friends were like, “are you okay?”
Yes, I am okay… now that the floor is covered with “get the fuck away from me” stickers.
The day I finally found out what was in my teeth, I was on the phone with a friend. That friend is one of those people good enough at adulting that they have a therapist and are attuned to the issues we millennials face as we age.
I was walking this friend through the ways I get all up in my head when it comes to the men in my life:
Courtship in the digital age is a waking nightmare. So is life with my level of self-esteem. So when a boy says “can we push dinner an hour?” I automatically think that he needs me to move dinner so he can get in another date with the other person he’s seeing, and then without asking this man if there even is another person, I presume he likes this other person more than me.
Because if he liked me more then I wouldn’t be the one moving my schedule. Therefore not only does this man think I am not enough — because he needs someone in addition to me — but he also likes me least of all the people he’s seeing. I debate canceling so he has more time for the other person, and then I debate never speaking to him again because I can’t handle the pain of being chosen second to someone who might not even exist.
To which my friend said: has it occurred to you that you have anxiety?
It had not.
I thought this circuitously only when it came to men. I come by the panic naturally, on account of all the gaslighting and lying I’ve been subjected to at the hands of past lovers and crushes. To me, it wasn’t the Big-A anxiety if it was restricted to a certain subject and I could fully trace the trauma.
But then my friend said: you might not have noticed you have anxiety because you’ve had your coping mechanisms for decades, and they work so well that you don’t see them as “coping.”
Maybe the way I yank all my eyebrows out when I’m on the phone scheduling appointments isn’t just a little quirk leftover from puberty. Maybe it’s anxiety.
Maybe leaving for the airport five hours before a flight wasn’t a relic from living in the boonies. Maybe it’s anxiety.
Maybe buying two oars and an inflatable swimming pool — and bike pump to inflate the swimming pool when the power went out— in case of a flood wasn’t just overkill hurricane prep. Maybe it’s anxiety.
My father is a prepper. Not of the Doomsday variety, but he certainly plans for the most likely “worsts” — a Gloomsday prepper, if you will. Because of him, I have a Bug-Out bag in my car that contains a first-aid kit, a shock blanket, and at least three ways to start a fire.
For Christmas my dad got me a solar-powered lantern that charges phones. My sister and I have matching machetes. If there’s an apocalypse, find your nearest Lurie.
My whole life, I thought my dad just liked being more prepared than everyone else. And he does. Because he has anxiety.
Maybe, like me, my dad didn’t know. Empowered by my phone call with my friend, I asked my dad over dinner if he thought he had anxiety. He looked at me over his sushi and said “Duh.”
No wonder he never told me what was stuck in my teeth.