My brain is evil. I don't mean it makes me want to do evil things, particularly to others (I like to think I'm a highly considerate person actually). I mean that it is evil to ME, particularly when it comes to my chronic anxiety.
We booked a family holiday to a foreign country, and my anxiety gremlins started chirping up with all sorts of horrible things more or less from the get-go.
"What if you can't get from the airport to the hotel?" was one thing.
"What if your cases get lost?"
"What if you let your family down by booking them into the world's worst hotel?"
If there was a horrible scenario in every situation, my brain would lock onto it, fixate on it, and actually cause me physical symptoms of illness (which, I suspect, may also have led to me coming down with a horrible cold while we were away - my body, already suffering from the psychological battering my brain was dishing out also suffered physiological symptoms that just made me more susceptible to picking up some nasty bug on the plane).
Evil brain just kept on and on. One aspect of the holiday was that I needed to pick up a car from a rental agency in the city where we were staying. I'd come up with a strategy to pick up the car, drive it back to the hotel to pick up my daughter and the suitcases, taking my wife along with me to navigate my way through a foreign country (where they drive on a different side of the road).
My evil brain would NOT let me imagine any other scenario than disaster.
"What if you crash the car? What if someone hits you? What if you can't get back to your daughter and the suitcases? What if you damage the car and lose your insurance excess? What if you drive on the wrong side of the road and pile into someone? What if the car gets a flat tyre, or breaks down, or bursts into flames" - It went on, and on, and on and on, constructing these disastrous scenarios which meant that I spent the third day of the holiday in absolute agony with a screaming headache.
Of course none of these things came to pass and of course my brain won't let me remember THAT, it will merely do the same thing the next time such scenarios arise.
Anxiety is like having an over-affectionate piranha fish gnawing at you. Just when you start to calm down (and I did eventually calm down), it'll take another chunk out of you and start you worrying all over again. On the holiday it happened probably a dozen times to the point that by the end of the holiday I was more exhausted and mentally drained than if I'd stayed at home.
BUT
You cannot live your life like that. You can't just "not do things" because you have a brain that works like that. You fight that evil bastard, you fight it hard, you fight it with all your mental and physical strength, and you batter that evil wrinkly little bastard into submission. Because you have to, you really have to in order to have any kind of a life.
I will never forgive my anxiety-raddled brain for any of the worry it's caused me, and through my ill-temper of worrying and being anxious, my horrible treatment of my family who only wanted to help me, and be there for me. My daughter, beautiful and wise (but also an anxiety sufferer) summed it up in a sentence that was like a gigantic baseball bat around the back of the head. "Dad, you don't have to do this alone you know, we're here too!" and she was so right. I always think I have to be the protector, the provider, the one who makes everything go smoothly and evil bastard brain likes to be the disruptive element to that. But she was so right, and there were countless times where she and my wife actually helped me and helped stave off panic attacks that would have destroyed me otherwise.
But yeah, fuck my brain. I hate it. And fuck anxiety, it's the most misunderstood yet cripplingly destructive 'illness' anyone can have.
Comments
Post a Comment