Anxiety and Brain Chemicals
So for the longest time I've struggled with anxiety on-and-off. It was at its worst when I was in college, but it's still not gone today. The past week has had me go through a few different facets of my anxiety and I figured I could talk into the void to get a little bit of therapy.
As I mentioned, my anxiety started flaring up earlier in the week. I was volunteering with a group I had not met in person before. The task was a simple one, hang flyers around the community. The group was very small, only four people including myself. I was the first to arrive, so when the second person arrived, I got to speak one-on-one for a bit. Being the healthy citizens we are, we both had on masks. Unfortunately, this made it a bit harder to hear me. My anxiety kicked in when I would say something that went completely unnoticed. Not their fault, but brain chemicals default to being blatantly ignored. While we walked together as a group, I was self-conscious that I wasn't interacting with each person enough, or somewhat unevenly. On top of that, we had to walk along a busy road. The constant whirring of cars driving by was overstimulating, causing me to have light twitches regularly. I felt comfortable that the group was not one to judge over things like that, but it still made me self-conscious.
Another instance that popped up this week was one morning after finishing the morning meeting for work. I called in remotely, and my boss had phrased “I'll talk to you later” ever so slightly differently than his usual quip. This had me panicking that I had done something wrong the previous day at work and was going to be reprimanded. No basis to that other than a slightly different inflection.
And today, I tried reaching back out to my Dungeons and Dragons friends. We've been on hiatus for a while, and I've been distant since I haven't been playing in their other campaigns. Just hopping in and talking about JoJo's Bizarre Adventure had me worried that I had upset them by showing up and changing the subject out of the blue. I even messaged the one friend I've been in contact with since the hiatus asking if the others were mad at me. This is the anxiety that hurts me the most because it makes connecting and reconnecting with friends really painful.
Fortunately, none of these are fully debilitating for me performing my normal life. They don't come up too often, and when they do, I can process and recovery pretty quickly.