What’s your anxiety trying to say?

My anxiety spoke to me today.

My anxiety recently showed up in a setting I know no longer feels uncomfortable to me, yet I still felt the heat spreading through my veins, as my heartbeats pushed loud & hard against my chest. And I chose to walk away from something I was convinced I had mastered by now.

My anxiety showed up just like the old days, and it made me feel like maybe I had been fooling myself all along. Maybe I just got lucky a few times, but nothing has really changed. Maybe I am my anxiety and my anxiety will always be part of me.

It was disappointing, and I tried to ignore it all just so I don’t feel worse. As I was journaling today though, my anxiety spoke to me. And it turned out that none of it was lack of progress. It’s true that it showed up the same way, yet this time, it had other things to say.

See, my anxiety normally stems from different thoughts. There’s my fear of judgment. My self-doubt, the things I believe I can never do. My inability to maintain healthy boundaries. My poor sleep, dehydration. And the list can go on and on, with things I was sure I’d been making progress on. This time though, it all turned out to be stemming from my shame.

The shame of not knowing.

Being in a setting where I felt like I might be asked questions I still have no answer for, was triggering. It clashed with my belief that I have to be equipped with all the knowledge out there before I can show up to certain places. And while there are thinking errors in there that need a whole other post to address, just knowing what was happening beneath the surface helped me approach this a lot more maturely.

Instead of despising my anxiety because it brought along unpleasant feelings, I was able to dig deeper and understand its purpose. And it made me realize that even though we might occasionally experience the same feelings, they aren’t always saying the same things, and they most certainly don’t always stem from the same source. They’re mostly there to alert us that something is going on. And if we give ourselves a chance, we might be able to figure that out before our desire to “make them go away” unnecessarily kicks in and instead makes them stay.