But those are the odd ones. On an average day, I'm stalked by panic and dread and the tick-tock-tick of finite number of heartbeats I'm allowed. If you can't conjur this, imagine walking around all day, in a heavily urbanized area, but still not all the way100% sure you aren't being hunted by a bear that lives perpetually on the edge of your perception. I call that "having a normal."
There are drugs for this kind of nonsense, sure, but if you're further convinced that your medically diagnosable general anxiety disorder is somehow also an essential part of your being--without which you won't be able to function in your normally exuberant and hypercreative mode, which normally expresses itself in you sitting alone watching YouTube videos of other people playing Fortnite--you'll be forgoing the pharmacological solution, thanks all the same. In this day and age of proclaiming your dysfunction, I'm an Anxious-American. Although I don't know that we merit a hyphenization seeing as we're not even really technically a minority. It's the most common mental illness in the United States, I'll have you know.
It might be slightly more tolerable on occasion if I were to self-medicate, but I'm comfortably certain that the occasional beer or THC edible would flick tiny cracks around the edges of my rock solid airtight self-control in all situations with the obvious and inevitable result of me eventually offering handjobs to businesspeople so that I might pay for crack. Because the imagined worst-case version of existence for me, in degradation and indignity, exists in a mental 1986.
This is most days. I'm certain I exaggerate slightly as I'm a functioning person with a job I keep and a family I occasionally let out. But a lot of mental and emotional energy is spent getting by. I recognize I am not unique in this, so I'm not claiming to stand out hoping to garner any kind of sympathy. Unlike some other cisgendered straight white men of whom I am aware, I make an effort to be conscious of how I present.
I'd like to engage more in the whatsits and the wherefores and the whathaveyous of the moment in this space or just in general, but like heartbeats, the attention span here* is finite. What if I didn't give the minute-to-minute a full once-over, or even a glance in its direction? Maybe I'd find out it just motors along, at the same level of full voice, completely fine without me, indifferent and eternal like the wind or Ed Asner. Or maybe if I turn and really consider it, I'll learn it's actually the bear lurking outside the periphery of my vision, only now the liquid seduction of my sea-blue eyes have hypnotized it into having to eat me right now.
The best thing to do, I find, is to pretend. There's chaos beneath the facade, sure. But there's chaos outside of it too. It's a question of equalizing the pressure inside and outside the vessel so nothing explosively decompresses, inward or outward. If I've learned anything in 44 years, the trick is not to try to actually achieve balance, no no no, that's something you might fail at, which invites more stress. It's to convince yourself you've got it all under control. Otherwise it's the maelstrom Pandora** wrought. I find if you just pound and pound and pound away with the hammer of resigned chipper-ness, you can get that box lidded up real snug-like. The people who can't, well, you can spot them a mile away, all twitches and flinches and lashing out and wild swings of emotion. Try it if you want to, but only one of them gets the be president.
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**The Greek mythological figure with the box of sorrows, not the music streaming app that made me remember Banarama were a thing.
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