Anxiety

Whenever I hear the word anxiety I have to think of a song by the Black Eyed Peas featuring Papa Roach. My favourite part of the song are the lyrics of the chorus:

‚The anxiety, sane and the insane rivalry,
paranoias brought me to my knees,
Lord please, please, please,
take away my anxiety‘

The whole song in general is great and right now I can identify myself with it more than ever. To me, anxiety is totally diffrent from fear. With fear I mostly associate things from the outside, like horror movies, spiders, the girl from ‚The ring‘ – you get the idea. Anxiety on the other hand comes from within. It doesn’t start at the beginning of a movie and stops with the end credits. Sometimes it hits you in certain situations and after a while you begin to see a pattern. You try to change something, avoid these situations or talk to somebody about it. Whatever solution you may find, to a certain extent you gain back control.
But what about those moments when anxiety suddenly hits you full force, out of nowhere? All day you felt kind of weird, but tried your best to ignore it. You met with friends, did some yoga and simply tried to not give this weird feeling too much room. But deep down you already knew that with every moment you tried so hard NOT to think about it, it only grew stronger.
You know, it’s always easy to give advice to others when they’re feeling anxious. You need to relax, take a deep breath, go for a walk, talk to somebody, take valerian, do yoga, meditate… Already heard them all. Those are in fact great suggestions, but once you’re trapped in the situation yourself and you realize that NONE of the above mentioned tips will help anymore, you’re left on your own. At least it feels like that.
What stages of anxiety you go through depends on you personally, but there’s something they all have in common: You want it to stop immediately, because you just can’t handle it anymore. Lord please, please, please, take away my anxiety. You wish for that one miracle that releases you, takes the weight off your shoulders, and sets you free. You know that this won’t happen, you know that you have to work for it yourself, YOU are the miracle you’re waiting for, but it’s so hard to think rationally once you’re caught in a spiral of dizziness, a racing heart, nausea, desperation and helplessness. Sane and the insane rivalry.
You may ‚only‘ experience this a couple of times in your whole life and even then it’s tough. But if this is part of your daily life, if you experience this sh** several times a week, if it controls you and takes away all the joy and lightheartedness, if people start to think that you’re weird because they don’t understand what you’re going through and if they then turn away from you because you’re not ’normal‘ or you’re not the person you’ve been before – then ‚paranoias brought me to my knees‚.

This article shall not be some kind of advice or self-help stuff, because in fact I don’t even know what to do myself. What I wrote is very personal and I may have opened up too much, but you know what? Writing it down here on my blog, totally honest and raw, somehow helped. I know I’m not the only one who feels that way and to all the people who don’t understand what we’re going through, maybe this article will show you that turning away won’t do any good. Nobody expects you to fully understand. Staying and listening without being biased is what matters here.

Lord please, please, please, take away my anxiety.

Image by lovely Svenja