A Time Traveling Letter To Me

Yesterday I realized I was feeling anxious and I got pretty excited about it. Not about feeling anxious, but about the fact that I can recognize it. I am going to have to parse this out a lot to get at what I mean. Because if I had heard someone say a few years ago that they were feeling anxious and recognized it I would have thought “um, yeah, that’s me all day everyday, wtf.” So here’s what I mean. I mean that I am sitting here in a fairly calm state, knowing I am safe, and feeling that there is anxiety in my body. I can see it, but I am not letting it think thoughts and I am not stepping into it. It is just a feeling I have, and if I am careful I can just sit with it, tell myself that I am safe, and shelter within until the storm passes.

I think the most respectful way I can explain is to share it with myself, so here is a letter to myself five years ago. It may not apply to you, as we are all different, we all came to our anxiety in different ways, and the journey out is individual. Maybe you will find something here that speaks to you. Maybe you will understand me or someone you love a little better.

You are on to something. That practice that you’re doing to help you learn patience with

Me five years ago pretending I was cool with being in an online forum for a college class

yourself will pay off. You needed patience your whole life. You needed time and space to process emotions and you just didn’t get it. This patience practice is going to get you there eventually. By simply giving yourself the kindness that you would wish to give a child you will grow enough calm within you to give it to your own children. You didn’t know it, but it had to start inside of you. Somehow you trusted yourself, and I am proud of you for that. I know it was hard for you. You’ll develop more realistic expectations of yourself, you’ll learn to be kind to yourself. It feels forced and awkward now, but one day it will feel like it is flowing out of you. Because it will be.

Once you get enough of that space inside you will notice that you feel a lot of things that you didn’t notice before. Your feelings will start to emerge from that little space you cleared within. And you will want to make more space so they can come out and have room to unfold. You will have to hang out with them for a while before you can tell them all apart. Sometimes it will be awful. You’ll open up to some really painful things that you pushed away before and they’re still in there. But you will use the space for them. Soon you’ll learn to hold space for others, and you’ll use those tools to hold space for yourself. You will realize that you needed someone to hold you and witness your pain, and process, and then you will do that for yourself. You will learn to give yourself grace and see those feelings you had without judgement. To your amazement this will help you to let go of judgement about others.

Things will get easier and harder, because that’s life. You’ll reach a place where you go back to the psychiatrist and take anxiety meds again, even though you swore you wouldn’t. What you will find once you can feel all those feelings is that some of them are stuff you have to process and others are anxiety that is too big for you to manage on your own. But this time you will get lucky and they will get it right the first time. Your poor nervous system has been so overloaded for so long. You will really enjoy the break this gives you. And yes, sometimes the anxiety will visit again. But now you’ve worked so hard at developing all those things you didn’t get to as a child that you can feel the difference between fear, nervousness, excitement, and anxiety. You will be able to go through your day telling yourself it will be ok and knowing you mean it. And you will believe yourself.

After a lifetime of being anxious and depressed you will get to experience joy and peace. The weird part is how hard those feelings will be to deal with. But you’ll learn to feel joy in the moment without waiting for the other shoe to drop. You will adjust to feeling peace. It will be the hardest one to get used to. It will feel like boredom at first. It will be hard to tolerate, I know it sounds strange, but it is the newest of all the feelings. Your mind will have things to say about it, but you will take the advice of those around you and let yourself feel peace without guilt and without wondering if you deserve it. Because you absolutely do.

And one day you will sit, and recognize the anxiety in your body and you will be able to hold space for it while your mind and the peace within you get you through. Yep, all of that inside you at one time. You remember that first time you heard Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”? The way that line struck you “I contain multitudes”? It will take on so much more meaning. You do contain multitudes, and you will have grace and acceptance for all of them, and that is how you will get to where I am. You will learn to trust yourself so deeply that you can tell the difference between the anxiety that was placed on you and the intuition that comes from within, that is now free to operate in the space you cultivated. You had so much help along the way, but it was you who accepted that help, it was you that chose the path, it was you that made the choices. You became who I am, and I am forever grateful to you for grasping at that little sliver of self trust that put you on the path that led to me.

There are still times when the anxiety appears. Honestly, I could deal with this forever and be ok. This is just a passing feeling and I know it. I want you to know that you will absolutely be able to live a life again. Even if anxiety is part of it until the end, you will live a life. You will learn what your limits are and respect them. You won’t feel the need to push yourself into situations that are bad for you. Once you get here you will be able to see the anxiety as communication. Sometimes it was screaming at you because you were doing something you weren’t comfortable with. Sometimes it would have been ok to say “no.” Some of those times you really needed to say no. Once you learn to respect your own needs the anxiety won’t need to advocate for you. It’s much like people point out that anger is communication, it is pointing to a way you have been violated. Your anxiety, it turns out, was sometimes trying desperately to protect you. Often it was way off base, but sometimes it was on the money. When you learn to listen to your feelings and emotions it won’t have to step in any more.

It is a slow process, I know. But there is hope. There is light. Taking care of yourself the way you are is exactly what you need to do.