Anxious as a Mutha

Some days I wake up with an urgency to look, feel, and be  different. If I'm being honest, it's actually an urgency to look, feel, and be better . Better than what I am right not. Better than what I've let myself become. As it stands, I have zero self-worth. The negative voice in my head is so judgmental and it is quickly becoming so loud that I can't drown in out with distraction. When I wake up in the morning I am forced to reckon with this version of myself, the one that I never dreamt would come to fruition.  This version, the one that is afraid of her own shadow, the one that is climbing out of the deepest hole of a lifetime, the one that takes an antidepressant that has caused vicious weight gain that makes me hate myself. Where did this person come from? Where is the woman who had a near perfect GPA in college, who could run 10-miler races, and could juggle everything and still laugh with a light heart? I feel like an alien in my own body and I crave the ignoranc...

 I suffer with anxiety, but I also suffer from impossible expectations of myself. After hitting an emotional equivalent of rock bottom mere months ago, I am still surprised when I have days where the gravity of it all weighs me down. I tell myself that I should be better and I grow frustrated, angry even, when my healing isn't linear and exponential. Mostly, I am  better. But there are wounds that still weep and a sense of shame and guilt that follows me like a shadow. I have never been adept at the concept of self love and now it is even harder to find redeeming qualities within. Anxiety and trauma and recovery were never supposed to be a part of my narrative. There are times when I simply can not accept the fact that panic attacks are something that, after 35 years of nary a one, I now deal with. When I really stop to think about it, there is a dissonance between who I am supposed to be and who I actually am. I know that acceptance is key for progress, but it is so much easi...

 Most days I feel like a fraud. I masquerade as healed and functional, but the reality is I am still very much afraid and unsure of who I am or how to move forward. I play the mental films of my worst moments and deepest fears over in my head and find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. I am aware of my worst cognitive habits, but some days I'm just too tired to fight them. I slip into negativity and catastrophizing and it takes herculean effort to unravel the knots created by them. When stress becomes high, my defenses against myself are reduced and the weight of it all threatens to flatten me. It's been a week. I feel like I've had that same thought every week for a while, but this week was a shit storm. The pandemic, which has been playing constantly in the background of our lives, got violently shoved to the front of our psyches, tripping all of our alarms along the way. A few potentials for exposure laid the foundation of worry for the week. Enter full virtual s...

Keep. Fucking. Going. It's a talisman and a mantra that I have come to embrace in a year that has tested all of my limits. I say it to myself when I start to doubt my own resolve, which is more often than I'd like to admit. There is a voice that constantly tells me I'm not strong enough to deal with obstacles in my way, and in those times when the hurdles seem insurmountable, the voice gets louder...until I cling to the fact that I must simply keep going. I repeat it on runs when my legs just want to stop moving; when my anxieties threaten to overwhelm me completely; when the kids buckle under the weight of this pandemic; on days when my dearest friend struggles to fight the cancer that took us all by surprise. I ask myself, if he can keep going, who I am I to stop?  My use of the KFG mantra was born with that very cancer diagnosis. We all needed a whisper of hope and the resolve to face whatever the future held. I found the KFG bracelet on Amazon and we've worn them ev...