Anxiety [Adventure]

[Adventure 29]

I have anxiety and it manifests in strange ways. 

For example, there are a million things I want to do, need to do, and should be doing. When my anxiety is at its peak, doing any of them - from making phone calls to doing dishes - makes me anxious. It's difficult for me to prioritize what is most important vs. what gives me the least anxiety. And then when I decide to do something, I need to do it now and complete it before motivation dissolves into panic. Motivation is incredibly soluble in anxiety. 

I have anxiety about the strangest things. Take taxes, for example. I have tax anxiety every year, and every year we get money back from the government because we're poor. Why on earth do I have anxiety about getting money back? I don't. I have anxiety about the fact that this is an official thing I'm doing and I could get audited and I don't even itemize anything because the tax program thing tells me it's useless to do so because we don't make much money in relation to our family size. And I use an online program and basically just have to answer questions and fill in the blanks and it's really not that difficult at all. The result is that, once I decide to do our taxes, I do our taxes. If this is at 2:30AM, then so be it. And heaven help anyone around me if I can't find a W-2 and am seven months pregnant and the person around me has the audacity to be sleeping. Not that that ever happened, mind you.

So there are days when I curl up in bed too anxious to go to the store for milk (and try to talk my child who also has anxiety into going for me), relieved that the number I needed to call went to voicemail (even if I did freak out and stumble over my words on the voicemail as usual), praying no one tries to contact me to have a conversation on the phone or online, and write blog post after blog post only to erase what I've written because it might not be good enough or may be taken the wrong way.

Nevertheless, there are also days that I am able to stand firm against my anxiety. I write a blog post and hit publish without re-reading it. I make a series of phone calls and feel like I'm adulting all over the place. I tick things off my to do list, run an errand or two out on the world, and don't give curling up in bed a second thought until my body says it's done doing. What separates anxiety-ridden days and calmer brain days, I have no idea. Neither is either predictable. So I live life both unsure of my body's ability to tackle the day and my brain's capacity for moving me smoothly through the tasks at hand.