Anxiety is my other name

Anxiety, for me, is not the second album created by the alternative rock/post-grunge music group Smile Empty Soul (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety (album) ). Rather, it is an unpleasant, emotional and relatively permanent state in my life that involves a rather complex combination of emotions that include, but is not limited to at any time; fear, apprehension, and worry ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety ) The varying degrees of fear, apprehension and worry fluctuate wildly throughout any given day.



Logically, I realise that this is because I am a 52nd generation member in a very long line of anxious people in my family. I have spoken before about my mother’s perennial question “can you do that?” that sticks with me to this day. If you can’t control it you have to be anxious about it. My flight or fight switch is permanently in high gear. Thanks Mum.



I also thank the Sister of No Mercy who taught me from age 5 to 12. They applied guilt and anxiety along with hell and brimstone, and a fair degree of corporal punishment, but that is an issue for another day. Let us just say that their not so tender unmercies certainly did nothing to soothe an anxious, shy child.



How anxious you ask? I can not listen to phone-in competitions on breakfast radio while driving to work in my car. As soon as someone is put on the spot and has to remember the 2nd line of the song played just before the 7am news, yesterday, I tense up and have to switch off the radio until I judge that it is all over and can switch back on to the music. I empathise too much. I feel their stress, their anxiety, their desperation to win that double pass to have smallpox vaccinations. Too much to bear.



I took pills for awhile, but then I started to get anxious about the medication I was taking. Long term effects? How long should I take the pills? If it says take once a day, is it better to take in the morning, or the evening? ….zillions of anxious queries and issues rising in my head again.



Anxiety is not all bad. It does let you write “I have great attention to detail” on your resume and mean it. I have “midnight epiphanies” where I wake in the middle of the night and think “NO! I forgot to reply to the email about the boobahs” and I cannot go back to sleep until I get out of bed, log on remotely to my office and send that email. Like someone is waiting at 3am to receive my missive.



A friend handles it better. If she has a midnight epiphany she just grabs something off her bedside table and throws it at the door. In the morning that thing lying on the floor reminds her of the issue and she deals with it. If only. I would worry that one of my kids would fall over the item just inside the doorway. After I threw my lamp I would eventually have to get out of bed and retrieve it. Then I would have to think of a new place to put the lamp to remind me about the thing that woke me up to worry in the first place. I would have to change that lamp’s position three times. By now day light would be peeping through my windows and I have to also worry that I will now be tired at work all day.



Would I be less anxious if I let go of my anxiety regarding my anxiety? Celebrated it even? I could have an ANXIETY party with an anxious looking piñata that I danced under while pulverising with a stick, thus representing the letting go of my anxieties. I fear that the sight of me in high party mode may frighten my few remaining friends and make them anxious about me, or at least my stick.



Or should I just embrace my anxiety and acknowledge it for what it is? Acknowledge that I will always walk back to the car, twice, to check that I did actually lock it the first time. No longer fight the fact that I will always make my daughters pack a jacket, even on holiday to Fiji.



I am 52 in 4 months time. Is it too late for a mature dog to lean new tricks ( would they be too hard, too complicated, too physical?? Or should I just go with the established status quo and keep harrying the bone? Make anxiety my friend?



I am not going to sleep tonight, am I?

Fluctuating fortunes are somewhat alien to me

Aliens are diabolical. They are masters of mind control. They can taken a normal woman and turn her into a raving obsessed lunatic with the flash of a dial. Yes it was weight day. First 4 scale readings on my electronic scales (I am nothing if not thorough) reported that I was a whopping 2.5 kgs smaller than last week. I knew they were having me on. So I walked away for three minutes then came back. Those 3 readings so I was now a kilo lighter than the same time and day last week.

Now I should have been happy with that, but no, I had to challenge the aliens. I had to weight myself again. Twice, actually. Back to 2.5.

I then lost all composure. I moved the scales to different floor positions, tried walking on with first the right foot, then the left foot. I did it in fast succession. Multiple times. Went away and dried my hair a little more until I risked looking like the triangular haired girl out of Dilbert. Weighed again. The readings ricocheted between the two figures.

I pulled myself together when I heard a noise and realized I was groaning and mumbling to myself. The aliens were playing the tune and I was twirling around my bathroom like a frenzied member of the Irish Riverdance troupe. I am glad the bathroom door was closed, so that no close family member witnessed Mother having more than a moment.

Reason would have told any sane women to split the difference and feel superior, but I think it is fairly well established I am a little short on sanity, especially under stress. I could have also not been greedy and sensibly embraced the1 kilo reading as a job well down. No, I had to try outwitting those aliens.

I shook the scales before replacing them on the floor and alighting once more. The top half of two electronic red zeros glared back at me. It refused to give me a coherent reading.

Do I take this as a godsend as the alien saga could now be put to rest? Or do I go out and purchase new bathroom scales, and maybe a tape measure to measure my circumference as a counterbalance to error? Oh, and a hair shirt (this season’s color of course!), all the better to torment myself with…

Weighty issues indeed.

To yurt, or not to yurt, is today's anxiety

I am going to live in a yurt (the traditional felt tent of the Mongols). I am going to erect it in the back yard, just over form the compost bin and not too close to the garden shed. When I am tired of the view I may move to the other side of my yard. Variety is the spice of life after all. That way I can minimize my household, and no longer have to take responsibility for the possessions that we have accumulated in a 30 year marriage that has produced three children.

I will come into the house to use the bathroom and dishwasher. And maybe to watch television and use the computer. Aside from that…oh and the laundry … I revoke my house usage.

The open life for me. My family may visit me, as long as they promise not to bring any odd pieces of paper, store catalogues, junk mail, old magazines, research notes for a degree completed in 1992 or the 7th draft of their latest job application.

I have tried adopting the “one new thing in, one old thing out” but my husband refuses to go. Just joking . The theory of buy a new thing, discard an item that you already own, should work well. How to choose though? Like for like? A skirt for a skirt? What if I love all my skirts, and wear them on a regular basis? An item for an item? A skirt for that disgusting bright orange blown glass vase that we got as a wedding present, in 1977? But what if the relative that gave it to us visits and it is nowhere to be seen? Could I handle the family rift on top of all my other anxieties?

The yurt (pronounced ger, by the way) seems like the best possible solution to me. No decisions to make about “stuff” and if I am lucky no one will notice where I am for a day or two.

What has brought on this desire to abandon all? The pest control man is coming on Friday. He is going to open all my cupboards to search for white ants/borers. I am going to be socially embarrassed in front of someone I do not know and will probably never see again. Why does it worry me? Why should I care? I don’t know, but it does. However at the same time it doesn’t motivate me to go to Olympian efforts to turn my house upside down and declutter on a major scale. I will just wallow in my own physical and psychological mess yearning for the elusive yurt..