Anxiety, The Teacher

Ever been driving in traffic and had a near-accident? 

A car didn’t see you in their blind spot and almost hit you when on the interstate; someone ran a red light and you had to slam the brakes on at the intersection; someone took a left turn without looking and very nearly sideswiped you.

I think almost everyone who drives has experienced this, and if you have you know the physical feeling: your heartbeat ramps up to pounding, skittering jolts of electricity shoot around your body in a closed circuit, all your muscles tense, your stomach twists.  Everything in your body telegraphs the message to your brain: Something bad!  Don’t die!  Don’t die!

Sometimes, I wake up like this in the morning.

There is no accident.  There’s no car.  There is, at times, a somewhat-proximate cause: the flight I have to take in a week (my current status!), a conversation I’m dreading, the presentation I wish I didn’t have to give. Sometimes not.  I just wake up, brain screaming and my whole body on fire, staring at the ceiling trying to wish it away.

Sometimes it comes at night, when I’m trying to fall asleep.  Apropos of nothing, my mind invents scenarios and problems and what-ifs and worries  Want a sample?  Here’s the flight playlist:  What if I can’t pop my ears on the plane and I end up in horrible pain?  What if I get motion sickness for the whole flight?  What if there’s turbulence?  Remember that time there was turbulence?  What if there’s a storm?  What if they mess up the seats and you get separated from your husband?  What if your seat on the plane is the worst possible seat for feeling turbulence?  What if the flight’s delayed?  I try to ignore it and roll over and over and over in a habit I have come to call “nightmare rotisserie.” 

Sometimes it is accompanied by a quiet, soft despair that leaches the color out of everything.  I feel removed from the world at those times, like I’m living in a tunnel or an isolated room, where I can’t reach anyone and no one can reach me but nothing feels like it will ever be okay again.  It is what I call the “last time” feeling: everything is shaded by a profound sense of despair, that this is the “last time” for me to do all the things I want to do.  Everything beautiful or playful or wonderful is thrown into poignant relief; everything sad seems magnified; no one else can understand.

I have been, and am, in therapy for this.  I practice mindfulness and acceptance.  I have done more breathing exercises than you can possibly imagine.  I pray—both for healing and for endurance.  I have committed Scriptures to memory.  I listen to praise music.  Others pray for me.  Sometimes I muscle my way through.  Sometimes I don’t. 

It is only recently, though, that I have been instructed to just…let it exist.

My therapist tells me not to resist the feeling, or push it away. She tells me the goal is not to eliminate the anxiety but rather to grow comfortable with uncertainty.  The therapeutic answer, hilariously, is to do…nothing.  To notice what I’m feeling—hi there, electric cattle-prod and desperate feeling of wrongness—and then turn back to whatever it is I’m doing without trying to fix or stop it.

This is harder than I would like.  It is less satisfying than I would like.  It has not given me what I primarily want, which is a guaranteed way to stop feeling like this.  If there is a guaranteed way to stop feeling like this, I am told, it is…to let myself feel like this and then get on with living.

This approach has turned anxiety into my teacher about faith.

Because can you imagine being in the boat, with the wind howling and the storm raging and water everywhere, and everyone is very rightfully panicking, and Jesus is snoozing away?  And when you wake him, instead of acting as though the miracle of stopping it all was what you deserved (because it is what you wanted), He asks why you’re afraid?  As though in the middle of all that mess you should have been contact that He was simply present?

Jesus, I am sure someone wanted to say, what am I supposed to do?  Be satisfied with the fact that you’re just around when all of that is happening directly in my face?  Be comforted even though it’s not clear to me you’re going to stop it?

Yes, Jesus tells us.  This has something to do with faith: this is the practice of belief.

What do we make of all the great heroes Paul cites in Hebrews, who die before glimpsing glory?  Of Jeremiah carted off out of Jerusalem, mourning?  Of my mother, who died in a way that was sad and terrible despite her great faith and her love for the Lord?  What do we make of the fear that lingers beyond our prayers, the wrong that happens in spite of them, the answers we don’t have and the feelings we can’t tame?

Who do we believe: what God said, or our eyes and our feelings?

Nothing is more of a feeling than anxiety.  It does things to the body, to the heart. It sets up a reality that is tailor-made for you to believe and you can’t turn it off because it comes from your very own brain.  It tells you: something bad!  Don’t die!  It tells you run away from everything that seems uncertain, scary, or painful.  It says: nothing is as good as safe.

God says: one day everything will be perfect.  And one day, in a world where there is no suffering or sorrow or pain, your spirit and your body be whole.  One day, your brain won’t do this any more, and you won’t experience this feeling. One day, I will vanquish this feeling along with everything else.  But for now, you can still know peace while the fear is there.  You’ll be upheld and comforted.  And every time you decide to get on with it as though it is all going to be okay despite all your body’s sirens in the background, you are practicing out a little bit of faith that it will be okay.

That what I feel and what I think don’t have the final word.

That God is good and will do good that I can see and feel and know.

That there is a reality I can’t fully comprehend but one in which I can abide.

That as Jesus perhaps wished, while the storm is still going full-bore, I can look at it and say, “Well, that’s happening”—and perhaps not panic, and perhaps not have my first impulse be just make me comfortable and then we’ll talk.

Anxiety is not the teacher I wanted.  But it’s the teacher God gave me.  I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be grateful for it.  But I am glad that in this as in all things, God can take something wretched and bring forth good.  I continue to practice what I know is true in Christ.  God remains present despite my faltering.

Please pray for me, for all of us, as we stumble along.