anxiety

anxiety: a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome

Worry, worry, let it scurry.

I'm not sure where I heard this phrase first-- perhaps my Grandma, perhaps a Disney movie, both of which are big influences from my formative years. Regardless of the source, I wish the act were as simple as the phrase. It seems especially easy these days for me to go from 0 to 60 in less than a nano second; jumping to the completely worse and utterly most outrageous conclusion has become a true skill of mine.  It shouldn't be something that I'm good at, but I am and for surprisingly valid reasons.  And it sure shouldn't be something that the people I care most about have to deal with (sorry mom, sorry dad, sorry everyone I have ever dated), but lucky for them they get to sit there and try to tell me to "just breathe," when god knows this has and never will work.  Poor things.

Seems silly, but lately I've been using a tool called "the calm happy place."  When regulating breathing, counting, and rational thought fail me, I am to think of this place and it is supposed to ground me and bring me back to the present, away from these escalated, and quite frankly, ridiculous concerns of mine. It's sort of a classy way to say, "fuck you emotions!" So what's my clam happy place?  Well, I thought about it for a long time, but the one that works the best comes from a memory of clamming in the Puget Sound.  Muck-boots or weighters on, cold foggy air, tree-lined sky, early gray morning, eating a doughnut, pressing my booted toes firmly on the sand to see where each bugger has hunkered down and buried itself in the wet, murky water, sounds of light weaves crashing far off the shore, smell of salt and evergreen. This is my calm happy place.  Another one that works well is me skating on the smoothest and longest board walk ever in existence. Calm. Happy. Places.

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As a last hoorah, I will say that my emotional state has swung in vast angles of opposition over the past few years. Starting as an oak with branches rigid and stiff, ending as balsa wood, soft and weak, I am working to become a willow balanced, rooted, strong, but flexible, and just the perfect amount of tangled, complex, and messy.

So maybe it's less, "worry worry, let it scurry," and more, "worry worry, process it, react, calm down, be balanced."

Lol.