The Anxiety Drip...
The Turning Feral Journal - Day 55
Day 55 – Anxiety and fear are two emotions that intertwine themselves deeply when the chips look like they are down. Each one feeding the other and collectively fanning oxygen toward the flame of self doubt. If not careful, the flames can overwhelm you and leave you as a heap of ashes, unable to take action against the force that let in the fear and anxiety – a place I have been too many times before.
But, why am I saying this today? Because it’s something I regularly struggle with. Those two emotions have haunted me like a ghost in almost every pursuit I’ve undertaken. They usually manifest as imposter syndrome when I find myself in a situation where I just don’t know the answer to something important. The fear always kicks off the party by allowing my mind to run rampant with worst case scenario outcomes. Then the anxiety comes in like a relieving ketamine drip to pull me back from the ledge, but purposefully gets me addicted to the shallow burial of the issue to never allow me an overall release from the problem. These two work together artfully to sink their talons in just enough to bring the right amount of misery — making it hard to shake their grip.
From youth to adulthood, they’ve been an omnipresent lingerer that pop in at the most infrequent of times. In sports, school, writing, my off-grid learning, and of course they have been visitors in my most recent bout of unemployment. It’s happened so much in my life that I can see it coming. And though I haven’t found a way to bar them from entry into my consciousness, I have come up with ways to mitigate the impact of the fear and to refuse the long term effects of the anxiety.
The answer? Prayer and meditation. Simple I know, but taking time to be alone with those two emotions and to unmask them for what they are, false feelings, has been an important growth step for me. Though overwhelming in their force for obstruction, fear and anxiety are usually cowardly in their own right. With some pushback they tend to crumble away once you put the control and autonomy of your emotions into something bigger than yourself. For me, that has been through faith and inward focus. Recognizing that my path is largely predetermined and that I can’t allow thin veneers of negative emotion derail me from that course. One of the beautiful sayings that I have adopted to help with this comes from a close friend who is on a journey through alcohol recovery… The opening of the serenity prayer, which reads:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Daily Prompt: What are you struggling with? Is it a recurrent theme in your life? What mechanism have you built to cope with them? Do they work? If not, what can you do to change up your mitigation plan?:
Motivational Passage:
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
—Epictetus
“How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.”
—Thomas Jefferson
Rewilding Action: Vegetable Glycerin. This is something you may not have on hand, but is great to keep around if you ever plan to turn reptilian skin into leather. When I turn snake skin or beaver tail into leather, I soak them in a 50/50 solution of Vegetable Glycerin and 93% rubbing alcohol solution for a few days. The result is a pliable leather that you could use for any number of critical things like bow handle covers, shoes, or hat bands! Glycerin is cheap and definitely one “food item” you should have en masse that is multi-use and has a long shelf life.
