The Anxious Experience

There are moments when the world feels overwhelming. The inside feels as if it will make the outside come crashing in through your skull, or at least through the cavity of your chest.

That’s where you feel the longing to connect with other people.

It’s acute. It’s a pull toward community and authenticity and rawness. But the more you feel it, the more you are afraid of sharing and reaching out to anyone. Those buzzwords rear back more like buzz saws.

You already feel as if your failures are defining you. If you reach out one more time, you may just be proved right. The self-fulfilling prophet will rear back his ugly head, shaking his mane in approval of the self-doubt and loathing you feel. If you’re lucky, he’ll eat you alive instead of just gnawing on you constantly.

After all, you already doubted whether any of it was true. Social media, the plethora of choices, and the mistakes of other people have cloaked you in the drape of apprehension.

It feels as if nothing good will come. All the past successes which are part of your story are shoved to the side by the current fear. If failures are defining you already, how much worse could it be? It could be worse. Let me count the ways I love the fear.

I could be shoved even more to the side, out of sight, of mind.

My soul can flounder, when totally out of sight.

To the ends of my being without grace.

I despise thee to the end of every day’s

Most violent need for want of socialite

I love thee freely as tied to a birthright

Of utterly and completely obsequious compliment

I abhor thee with passion bent to abuse

In service of old grievance and need for simple acceptance

I love thee with a grasping hand, each follower I lose

With my profane prayers. I put up with you while breathing,

Smiles, jeers, in all parts of my life; and if I so choose,

I shall hold thee bitter until death.

Melodramatic? Perhaps. 

It’s how I feel sometimes. Are the feelings real? Absolutely. Do they describe reality? Maybe some parts of it, sometimes.

Anxiety crowds out other parts of my own reality. It crowds out positive and neutral things. It even crowds out very real things more pressing which need to be dealt with in life. 

Writing is one of my coping mechanisms. I’m not always perfectly functional. But there are better days and worse days. One of the best things is seeing that anxiety does not define me. In the same way that depression, laziness, or moodiness do not define me.

Even my good traits do not define me.

I am a more complex person than how I feel at any given moment (or series of moments). I am more complex than my mistakes and successes.  The way I view my self isn’t even the most important part of my story.

But wait there’s more! My story, my definition of self is a part of something bigger. There is Good News.

Part of the Good News is that Jesus has redeemed me. This redemption isn’t just for me. But it includes me.

In all that messiness and fear. Jesus gives me a new definition. If I fully got the Gospel, in terms of narrative and impact and all that other stuff, I still wouldn’t fully get the Gospel.  There must be a mix of immanence and transcendence. Mystery is part of the experience.

Jesus speaks to us even in our fear. He speaks even amid my fear and apprehension. He speaks even during my anxiety. That’s why I am going to embrace it instead of running away from it.

Christ is all in all. It doesn’t eliminate how I feel. But He is here in it, and I know I am not alone.