Anxiety, Ideas, & Home Sweet Home

I don’t get it. I’ve been working each day to calm my mind, to quiet my thoughts, to fight the voices in my head that try to keep me in fear. So why is it that come Friday night, I have a kind of small terror grow over me in the face of a relaxing weekend? What is it about next month’s cruise that instills in me a panic, not just for the flight, but for the following week?

As I walked to work today, under a beautiful blue and open sky, and a cool breeze stirring the leaves around me, I tried to sort it out. It isn’t the trip itself. It isn’t even the flight. It’s simply the idea of being caged by the circumstances surrounding my vacation.

The idea of being powerless taunts me. The idea of being out of my safety zone, and far from home, scratches at my mind like a terrible itch. It isn’t getting on the plane that offends me, it is the metaphor the plane has become: a symbol of something taking me away from what is only an idea of safety. Home.

Home. It is likely the most comforting word in the English language. It is where a person can be him or herself. Where one can drop all pretenses, and quit playing the games that we all play in the day-to-day rat race of our lives. It is where we feel safest. It is where we are surrounded by our belongings and those keepsakes of times before. We can be happy there. Or sad. Or angry. Whatever the case, we can do whatever and be whoever we want to be. There is no pressure.

But it is all an illusion. As with anything in life, anything can disappear in a moment. A home can be lit on fire, or washed away in a flood. A gale wind can drop from the sky, pick up your home, and toss it like a rag-doll. And these are just natural instances. My point being, no matter where you feel safe, an event can take away your idea. An idea is just that, it is a concept. An idea can be a thought, a conception, a notion. It can be an impression, an opinion, a plan of action, an intention, or even a groundless supposition or a fantasy. But it is a thing that exists solely within the mind. It is a result of mental understanding. But a mental understanding can be wrong. An idea can just as easily be false as it can be true.

The world at large once had an idea that the world was flat. And that was inaccurate. That was false, in the realm of facts. As children, many have an idea that Santa Claus brings them presents on Christmas. That is also false in the realm of facts. And let’s face it, we all have ideas floating around in our heads that we defend righteously…only to late discover that we were wrong. So why do we cling so vehemently to these things called ideas?

Perhaps it is simply ego. Perhaps it is an environmental trait we picked up as stubborn children attempting to match the stubborn nature of the adult world. Or perhaps it is a survival instinct we needed tens of thousands of years ago to survive in a harsher world. Maybe our predecessors needed to embrace that which they knew and believed. I don’t know that a single answer can be written. I do know that I struggle with anxiety. With fear. I have most of my life. But when I was younger, it seemed much easier to overcome. But now? Now it seems almost worse, despite my knowing how much I have survived.

Haha, listen to me talk. You would think I am having fear about going off to war. I am literally having fear about going on vacation! It is ridiculous.

And I know it is ridiculous. There are people without the money to go on vacation. There are people with too many responsibilities to pick up and adventure for eight days. But here I am, scared of my own shadow. Yes, right now, in this moment, I know I am a fool. What am I trying to hold on to? What is it that puts knots in my stomach in the middle of the night? It is like I am only half the keeper of my mind, and the other half is controlled by another. I hate it. Why can I not simply let go of these fears and move past them without a second thought?

…

I don’t know. But I’m working on it. Dispelling the illusion of safety is something I have done before. But apparently it is a lesson I need to relearn. I have fought my fears in the past, but they have an insistency to return. Now I am armed with the knowledge that I am a prisoner of my own ideas. You would think that would help me in some small way. But I am a creative, which cannot help matters. As I can build entire worlds of fiction for my characters and my novels, I can do the same with my own fears and anxieties, armoring them against my own defenses. If I were outside my own head, I would likely marvel at the complexities of my own mind. Instead, I’m just annoyed.

So I guess I just have to try and break down the barriers of ideas. Find a way to dispel the solidarity of the things I think I know, and instead uphold the truth: that ideas are just that. Ideas. There are facts in the physical world, but the anxieties I have are simply fears with no concrete standing. My anxieties are wisps of air in the reaches of my mind. But amazingly, they still manage to cause me pain and discomfort.


“When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive: to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”
- Marcus Aurelius