It’s All in Your Head

MATTHEW DONLAN

I’ve lived with anxiety all my life, and occasionally it’ll come up in conversation. Often, after I mention I have anxiety, people who have no experience of it ask what it’s like. Well, that’s very hard to articulate. How do you explain a pervasive feeling to someone with a completely different experience to you?

Before I attempt to answer this, let me first address something. Please, for the love of all that is holy, never tell someone with anxiety (or any mental health related matter) that it is ‘all in their head.’ This is the single most infuriating thing you can say. It’s like telling someone with a broken hand, ‘don’t worry about it, it’s all in your arm.’ I know! That’s the issue! It’s not the location of the problem I need diagnosing, it’s the problem itself I need resolved.

So let me try to explain what is going on ‘in my head.’ It’s hard to know where to begin because my anxiety has always been there, and it has always been changing. A quick comparison I go to is the experience of getting stage fright: palms sweating like Niagara Falls and Cirque Du Soleil rehearsing in your guts. At least for me, these bodily reactions are just a small part of the experience. When they happen, it’s opposite to the normal circumstances. I am most calm right before a presentation, job interview or exam. I am most nervous when I’m grocery shopping or about to meet with friends.

I once saw someone say that anxiety was like having conspiracy theories about yourself that only you believe. This begins to go deeper to my experience. For me, the questions running through my head while in public often sound like a cheesy voiceover from a teen rom-com. Are people looking at me? Why are people looking at me? Is there something wrong with my face, my hair, my clothes? Am I in the right place? Why am I here? My eyes dart from person to person as I work out how to make my time in public as short as possible. What is the fastest route I can take around Aldi? When are the quietest times?

These thoughts though aren’t often as overt as I’ve made them here. It’s more like the feelings attached to the worst-case scenarios of the answers that permeate my mind. It’s the feeling that something is wrong that you don’t know about. It’s the feeling that everyone has seen something you are blind to. It’s the feeling that you aren’t in on the joke, and the joke is about you. You’re detached, isolated, different from everyone else. You squirm in your spot, hoping the attention shifts to someone else. Being in public is not just being ‘out of your comfort zone,’ it’s standing in the middle of No Man’s Land. But instead of bullets and bombs, it’s glances and thoughts.

Then there are the night-time thoughts. These come to me right before going to sleep. They jolt me awake in a panic, prolonging my fall into my dreams. For example, an all so joyful train of thought I once had posed the question: what would happen if you got a call right now telling you your parents were dead? So begins the hypothetical exercise. How would I get home? Who would I tell? What would happen to my assignments? Can I just leave my work? How much will this cost? How will I react when I get home? What will happen to our dog? How do I tell my parents’ family? On it goes until my brain tires itself from these mental gymnastics, eventually succumbing to the safety of sleep.

Of course, throughout that I became more panicked. I try to distract myself, to tell myself that things are okay now. Then a new question appears; what if all my friends don’t actually like me but instead talk to me out of sympathy? It begins again.

And then there’s the existentialism. The hyper self-awareness that isn’t based on honesty but on layer upon layer of self-projection. Questioning my values, my place in this world, the meaning I derive from everything I do. Asking if what you’re doing is the right thing for your future. Why aren’t you trying harder? Always digging to find who I truly am beneath the masks I wear in public and the masks I wear for myself. This quickly turns to cynicism and apathy before my mind clicks back to ‘normal mode’.

Each of these parts of my anxiety begin to point towards my experience. But unlike those reading this without anxiety, it doesn’t just end at the next paragraph. For me, it will always exist. The thoughts coming to the front of my brain before I can stop them. Suddenly grieving for a lost family member who is still alive in the real world. Avoiding social settings because of the number of people, but then sitting alone knowing you’re missing out.

Living with anxiety isn’t fun. It’s prodding and probing. It provokes your insecurities. It makes sure you’re never fully comfortable where you are. But that’s not to say that life isn’t fun, it’s just that anxiety gets in the way. And all this… this is just the surface of my experience, but I know it is not an experience unique to me. I’ve seen online more and more people willing to talk about their experiences with anxiety. Granted, it’s occasionally in a selfdeprecating way but there’s also more genuine story-sharing. I take a strange sort of comfort in knowing that I’m not the only one. I’d never want to inflict this experience on others, but to know there are other people experiencing this is comforting. Perhaps it’s one of the only comforts in what is otherwise a very uncomfortable experience.