A Tale of Anxiety and the World Around It
Today I want to paint you a picture. It is morning time, a cloudy day, it looks like it might rain, but it is warm. I am sitting at my living room table, it is 9 AM and I have just spent the last three hours reading. Mostly reading the news.
I woke up this morning to very heavy news. A shooting has just taken place in the south of my country. This hasn’t happened in a couple of years. This one feels especially heavy because I had just heard of the mass shooting in Allen, Texas, a couple of days ago, where mostly children died. It seems everywhere I look, guns are taking innocent people’s lives.
Last week, I tried sheltering myself from the news. I don’t think I had a choice, because I honestly didn’t have the time to catch up on the news. I was too busy relishing in the fact that my in-laws had flown across the world to spend time with my husband and I, in my home country. It was magical, I wanted to immerse myself in every single moment, and be completely present with my family.
But at some point in life, reality is inevitable. You have to catch up on emails, you have to catch up on the news of the world. You can try to escape it all, but it’s simply impossible and quite unhealthy.
For somebody with anxiety, finding balance between staying connected to the world and disconnecting when necessary is extremely difficult. Especially when it seems like everything around you is falling apart.
To me personally, disconnecting from the news seems privileged. As a North African living in a country where instability is prominent, I can’t simply disconnect. How can I? When I look around, I see prices going up every single day and people falling into extreme poverty because of it. Drunk driving has gone off the charts with accidents all over the country, making the mortality rate soar. This morning, a gunman decided to go into a synagogue and start shooting. It’s hard not to ask myself how important is my anxiety, really, compared to the lives that are lost every day?
When asking myself this question, I find that I don’t have a choice but to stay connected to everything that is happening. At the expense of my own mental health. I may have worked hard to find that balance, but it isn’t easy to cultivate in hard times where everything around you seems doomy and gloomy.
Lately, I have discovered an unusual tool to help with my anxiety. To take everything with humor. Not minimizing them, of course, but rising above my daily anxieties and working with them through humor making being optimistic relatively easier. So far, it’s been helpful. Today, however, nothing seems funny.
Hope and optimism seem to take a backseat as the clouds envelop the sky and the sun shies away behind them as if to say “today isn’t a day for light.” From the weather to my heart, it all seems melancholic. We’re in mourning.
Days like these flare up my anxiety. As I have mentioned before, nothing sends me over the edge as much as having absolutely no control. Having no control, to me, equals being helpless. In this instance, I feel helpless as I sense the world around me slowly developing into a gangrene.
I want to have children. I know that I want to be a mom. But every day, I ask myself the same question: is it fair to bring a human being into this world? To throw them into uncertainty? Will they have the necessary tools to persevere? I worked very hard to have my own toolbox for resilience but today I can’t seem to find one tool that’ll help ease the sorrow I’m currently feeling. I know I don’t want my future children to feel this.
During the 2020 lockdown, with the massive influx of information coming at us from everywhere, I doomscrolled and watched the news simultaneously 24/7. It wasn’t until I couldn’t breathe that I decided to put the phone away and turn the TV off. Out of necessity. It was as if my survival instinct kicked in: I had to push it all away if I wanted to survive.
I refuse to relive that. Mainly because I worked so hard to get to where I am mentally. Partly because I know I can channel my anxiety and fear into doing something! And I can’t do anything if I’m operating on constant fight or flight.
I leave you with this: after three hours of reading the news, I’m going to turn it all off. I’m going to lay my mat on the floor, do some yoga and meditate. I am then going to figure out how I can ease the pain and sorrow of the people around me.
For today, that’s all I can do.