unfounded/founded
I live in fear. This has nothing to do with current events, and everything to do with an anxiety disorder. I am Chicken Little. The sky is constantly falling in my world. Everything is a disaster. I am afraid of car accidents, of construction mishaps, of unpredictable weather and dying in my sleep. Every day is a road map of terror and just navigating through that without having a nervous breakdown takes all my energy.
Most of my fears, almost of all my anxiety, is of the unfounded variety. There’s no reason for me to fear the things I do, to go through life as if I am one second away from an unmitigated disaster. But this anxiety disorder has me wound so tight I fear I might never unravel. It’s a fantastical life I have laid out for myself, one where my daydreams are nightmares, where I’m constantly thinking about the things that will surely befall me. I call them daymares.
It doesn’t help when the realities of life intrude on my worst-case-scenario daymares. Hurricane warnings, things of that sort, send me over the edge. So when scores of innocent people are gunned down while shopping or enjoying a night out, while they are at a movie or a festival or in church, my heightened sense of anxiety goes into overdrive.
Not only does my fear of everything make my head buzz with anxiousness, but this is coupled with the rage I feel at every aspect of our government for their complicity in the deaths of so many. My body literally vibrates. My hand shake. My mind races. My heart rate soars.
But I have to live my life. And so I drive to work — my usual commute filled with a fear of collision now compounded — and grip the wheel until my knuckles are white. I enter the courthouse where I work well aware that it’s a place where volatile people line the hallways every day, a place that regularly gets bomb threats. I spend my workday reading the news in between doing my work. I get mad all over again. I get sad all over again. My emotions are a jumble, and none of them are positive.
I finish my workday and I have errand to run; Walgreens, 7–11, the post office. But I have added a new fear to my repertoire: I am on the lookout for people with guns, for mass shooters just waiting for their moment. I just want to go home. And so I put the errands off and I go home to the relative safety of my own house, the only place where I get some sense of peace.
The world is a terrible place right now. White supremacy is on the rise. Guns are being used for, well, what they are meant for. People are being murdered at an alarming rate. There was not even 24 hours between El Paso and Dayton. It feels like nowhere is safe from angry white men carrying guns and if regular, normal people feel like that imagine what someone with a raging anxiety disorder feels.
I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want to be full of trepidation every time I walk into a store or a movie theater. I don’t want to be constantly surveying my surroundings, looking for the fastest way out or the best place to hide. It’s bad enough that my anxiety causes me to think of things like fires and natural disasters on a continual basis, grandiose fears that are usually born of nothing. Now I have this reality barging in on my anxiety, knocking on my brain to be let in. It wants a space amid all my ridiculous fears. And it comes in whether I ask it to or not; it has entered, it has settled in, it’s there for the long haul.
Unless we do something about it. Which is unlikely. It will keep going on like this for a long time, shooting after shooting, massacre after massacre, and they -the people in charge — will give lip service to gun control with one side of their mouth while spewing out nonsense about video games and mental illness with the other. This administration will keep pandering to its base by making immigrants the scapegoat for everything, emboldening those whose hate has reached a fever pitch. It will go on and on.
I’m grateful for the medication that keeps my disorder from sending me over the edge, but I worry that these very real fears will push me to the brink, and I’ll end up cowering at home, agoraphobic, scared, angry and helpless.
I am nostalgic for the days when my fears were unfounded, when I only had my anxiety disorder and its pretend monsters to contend with without worrying about real monsters with guns.
