The Litany Against Anxiety

It's been a day of emotional labor, receiving others' anxiety and handing back calm support. It's normal friend stuff. I rely on others doing it regularly. Today there was just a lot of it, though, and it's left me a little drained.

As it happens, I have some anxiety about other stuff going on in my life. For whatever reason, when I expressed those worries to different folk today, I got, well, less than gentle support. You need to get on that and stop worrying so much about it.

I've gotten great support from these same sources before; I'll get it again. They were just stressed out and not in a place to pay out some emotion work. It's worth noting, also, that their advice was probably on point. But I wasn't needing advice; I needed support.

It reminds me to put a clamp on my own tendency to fix through advice. When someone presents me with anxiety, my first instinct is to banish the anxiety--through Brilliant Solutions! That reaction derives not from a sense that my advice would actually work. What do I know about other people's problems? It's about my own discomfort with anxiety generally. I hate being anxious. I hate for my loved ones to be anxious. I really hate getting handed others' anxiety as a problem for me to fix, a burden for me to carry, or a drama for me to act in. It takes energy, upsets my zen thing, which I don't have but aspire to.

Of course, as previously mentioned, I hand out my own anxiety freely.

But still.

The wiser way, I think, lies close to the "litany of fear" from Frank Herbert's Dune:

I must not fear. 
Fear is the mind-killer. 
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. 
I will face my fear. 
I will permit it to pass over me and through me. 
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. 
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. 
Only I will remain. 
-Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.

Change fear to anxiety. I don't mean "I must not be anxious." You can hardly help that. But you can say I must not participate in anxiety. I must not spread anxiety. I must not return anxiety for anxiety.

I will face anxiety (my own and others'). I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

That last part is key. I have to let myself feel the anxiety, the cringe, the gulp, the yikes, the everything. (So much of my energy, I recognize, I spend on dodging and weaving and ducking anxiety or awkwardness--much more than actually experiencing anxiety would burn up.) And I have to face it not as a permanent state but as an experience, a process with a beginning, middle, and end. The knowing it will end, I find, makes the middle more endurable.

Obviously this is an ideal. I don't do it well, I'm afraid. But I try.

Where the anxiety has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I, and my friends.

More tomorrow,

JF