Jason Isbell has such a good song about anxiety, appropriately titled "Anxiety".

Anxiety, why do you always get the best of me, I'm out here living in a fantasy, and I can't enjoy a goddam thing!

First 30 something years of my life I’ve been convinced there’d be something very wrong with me because I never knew what I wanted like my peers, untill I finally realized I didn’t know what to want because I fucking already had everything I needed.

There was a brief period in college where I used to get super scared of going up a flight of stairs. It's crazy because I've lived in a house with stairs my whole life and ventured into the city and climbed stairs all the time. There was just something about this campus that made me have a near heart attack for almost 2 years. And it was only going up. I could literally sprint down the stairs and be fine. Going up I'd get real nervous and it felt like I ran a marathon when I got to the top.

Anxiety leading into a job interview isn’t intrinsically ridiculous. But maybe the manner in which my anxiety expressed itself was ridiculous.

I interviewed for my current job in June 2022. A week or so before the interview, I had a fairly vivid dream (abnormal for me) in which I woke up on the day of my job interview to discover that I was in Ukraine having volunteered to help them fight off the Russian invasion.

I was riding in the back of a truck with some other foreign volunteers, sorta like the very beginning of the Skyrim story (except we weren’t prisoners). I wasn’t worried about getting shot, or getting blown up by a drone, mind you, I was worried about missing my job interview.

Work stuff.

What if someone discovers that I don't actually know everything? Or, god forbid, due to not knowing everything I overlook something, or make a mistake?!

I would surely have to lose everything and everyone that I love.

That I'm going to have to drive somewhere, which wouldn't be so bad if I could get it out of the way, but it's scheduled for a few months in the future, so I'm going to have to keep worrying about it for the entire intervening time

I was worried if I did something too well... oh no! so I panicked until I couldn't do anything well. That's been the first 40 odd years of my life.

I used to wake up with panic attacks every morning roughly 2 hours before I needed to get up. Lasted around 3 years. Those were about nothing, just having to face another day.

Those mostly went away but the anxiety in general never did.

Now I’m on antidepressants and sort of maybe starting to feel better physically? On day 5 I think.

Talking to my friends who I know love me and are happy to hear from me no matter how long it has been. But what if they don’t anymore?

Every phone call I have ever made.

I'm anxious about death. What a load of bullshit. You're fucked into existence without consent and when you finally find something in this hellhole to be even the slightest happy about you realize you can't enjoy it in peace because your body will wither and die? Bull. Shit. Anyway, I'm told it's ridiculous to anxious about the end of life, so.

i know right .. but.. hear me out, what if something does happen ?

enough to give me shingles, and alopecia areata when i was taking classes at a CC, that decided to make thier classes harder than nearby state unis.

This weekend my brain has been panicking over packing for a trip, the brakes on my motorcycle, and the fact that the house is in such a state of disarray.

I have always had exceptional difficulty with the last part. No, it's not depression. I have always been a slob since I was growing up. I don't know how adults manage to put things back where they go and keep things neat and tidy all the time. It's always so overwhelming to me. My brain has felt like it is on fire the past few days.

It's like there are so many things that I want to or have to do that I end up flitting haphazardly between all of them and discovering new tasks along the way. So things never get done.

I love alone but sometimes I wonder that it might help if I lived with one other person lol.