Anxiety: The Worst Super-Power

A depiction of my anxious mind from one of my past panic attacks.

I wrote the following in the midst of one of my most extreme panic attacks, and I think it captures perfectly the ridiculousness that goes on in my head and my attempts at coping with it.

Warning: Strong language, adult themes, etc etc.

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Anxiety is a miserable super-power.

Talk about getting the short-stick.

Basically, my super-power allows me to live at such a low self-confidence level, that when my self-confidence rises to something approaching normality, I over-do it - not being used to this "normal" level - commit some trifle faux-pas, and immediately become consumed by sheer terror, as if I've just snapped out of a black-out and looked down to see a bloodied knife in my hand and the body of some innocent old lady eviscerated over the ground beneath me.

This also leads me to wonder whether I am even able to tell the difference between a minor trifle, and a major mistake; so even when I try to tell myself "it's not nearly as bad as you think it is", maybe I'm wrong and it really is just as bad as I think it is?

Cuz, yknow, sometimes it is.

It's like Russian Roulette without the promise of a quick death, instead each chamber causes some kind of trauma which you seem to keep surviving: like you either get slapped in the face, or waterboarded, good luck!

Combine that with the power to freak the living FUCK OUT at any bodily sensation that seems even minutely abnormal. Hell, even when you feel just a little too normal. "Woah that was 0.1735 heartbeats per minute above average, I am clearly dying here."

You know that feeling like every organ has its own personality? Not in a good way. Not in a quirky way. More like a neurosis, a psychopathology.

There's the heart, paranoid, jumpy as shit and armed with a taser; the bowels, with severe outbursts of unprovoked anger and rage; the intestines, going through phases of self-harm with razor blades; and the stomach, who somehow manages to reflect and amplify everyone else's issues.

Meanwhile, the liver and kidneys just sort of hang out together, away from the others so no one knows what's going on with them until they turn up one day and kill everyone with no warning.

Then there's the lungs - perhaps the most normal of them all - who can only look on, wishing they had never been born into such a dysfunctional body.

This is all before worst-case-scenario-psychosis¹ sets in.

Now we turn everything else up to 11, while acting out in our all-powerful simulation machine that is our mind all of the very worst possible places our current anxiety-of-the-moment could lead; interestingly enough, it almost always ends in excruciatingly painful death, physically, socially, metaphorically. Somehow, forgetting to reply to that person who needed my attention at work on Slack the other day and discovering 2 days later plays out in my mind as a CRIME PUNISHABLE BY CRUCIFIXION!

To try and stop your own mind from simulating all of these horrific Evangelion-style endings over and over and over and over, you find yourself flailing around looking for someone to tell you it's all going to be OK and that you're not crazy, but you can't of course just go around asking random people nearby to tell you that can you?

"Excuse me ma'am, I’m so sorry to bother, but would you mind telling me that I'm not out of my motherfucking mind please?"

So now you're messaging people who you can ask that question of, but sometimes that doesn't elicit an immediate response because these people have, y'know, lives, and shit, so after about 3 seconds you can't prevent yourself from trying to find another person, usually someone you can't just explain your current state of mind to openly, and act as if you're just tryna say hi and hope they provide some kind of useful distraction to your supreme mental anguish, and rinse and repeat until you have just contacted a lot of people within a span of 1 minute, and still, NO ONE HAS REPLIED WHERE IS EVERYONE ITS BEEN ALMOST AN ENTIRE MINUTE so you try to look at things on reddit to calm you down, picking up where you might have left off in a previously non-psychotic state, so you open the tab and you try to smile a kind of knowing smile as though you're recognising your old self "Why hello, handsome man, oh wait that's me" but it feels so fake, because you don't feel like that old self, that old self from 45 minutes ago when you were not this total psychopath you have become, looking for comfort through some kind of past-osmosis.

No, that version of you is dead, loooong dead now.

46 minutes now, shit, where IS everyone?!

Are they having some kind of meeting about me, talking about how they're gonna need to commit me to an institution and maybe have me arrested and then torturing me with minor criticisms - not necessarily in that order - because that's what this feels like JESUS CHRIST WHAT WAS THAT NOISE?!

Oh, a notification.

WHY ARE PEOPLE MESSAGING ME!? I'M TRYING TO HAVE A PANIC ATTACK HERE!

Oh, that was them replying to my thing from 2 minutes ago, fuck now I have to think of something not crazy to say next awoigaoermgae this is too hard so I am going to bed now good night.

Zzzz. 😴😪

"That boy needs therapy" you might say to yourself, and you would be right; all well and good, but have you seen my fucking brain my dude? This is how actually being totally open and honest in a therapy session goes in my minds simulating eye:

Unsuspecting Therapist: "So, how are y---"

Imagined Self: "Oh my GOD do you have any idea how many times I have fantasised about carrying out various bizarre forms of ritualistic murder-suicide as an escape hatch for embarrassing situations?"

Therapist: "Uhh n--"

Imagined Self: "The other day I'm pretty sure this guy on the train heard me mumbling to myself and I was so embarrassed that someone would discover that I talk to myself I began to imagine elaborate scenes in which I crush everyones skulls with my many bare hands (I'm an octopus in this scenario) an--"

The Entire Universe, Therapist Included: "You are clearly a danger to yourself, others, society at large, and you should spend the rest of your life in solitary confinement, with the only human contact being a slap to the face once every 3 days. Guards, take him away!"

This is the world I live in, and just when you think you will never escape this episode of hell-on-earth, days have passed and you apparently forgot all about it, and aren't we glad that definitely-one-time totally-unique-experience is over and we can get on with our lives, phew!

That's when your heart says: "Hey did you just hear that? What was that? I bet it was something coming to kill us, I'MMA TAZE MYSELF JUST TO BE SAFE FFZFZFZFZZFZFZFZZZZ"

...and around we go.

What were we talking about?

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1. I don’t mean literal clinical psychosis, thankfully it’s not that bad. It’s more like extreme catastrophising. I’m being hyperbolic.

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