Anxiety Manifest

HOW WILL MY ANXIETY MANIFEST TODAY?

Anxiety is a strange monster. It doesn’t always weigh logic or statistics. In fact, it rarely references the sciences at all. Sometimes it creeps in; sometimes it attacks like a hippopotamus on the good drugs. It’s rarely predictable and even less common for anxiety to be helpful. The person who experiences anxiety gets to ask the daily, if not hourly question: How will my anxiety manifest today?

I am one of the many delightfully special people who are rarely anxious about what other, “normal” people are anxious about. For the most part, my anxiety revolves around social situations (am I letting others down?) or productivity situations (am I getting enough done to be valuable?). Those are not unusual in and of themselves; I don’t know anyone who is excited about letting others down. But those of us special individuals are frequently, well, just not on the same page as others. 

THE PLANE MANIFEST

How do I explain this? Let’s picture an airplane. Specifically, my day is an airplane. We have a planned destination and we’ll arrive somewhere eventually. There could be delays or even eventual cancellations, but the passengers have tickets and we’re ready to go. The passengers are varied, some melancholy, some excited, some ambitious, and some already asleep. 

And anxiety is on the manifest. It’s actually taking up several seats. But where most people’s plane has some fears and concerns (getting COVID, embarrassing yourself at work, losing a loved one) those of us with intense anxiety have…less common passengers on our manifest. 

SURGERY ANXIETY

Allow me to illustrate my point. 

Last week I had a minor, preventative surgery. I had a cyst in my right breast that was growing at an annoying rate, and although a biopsy proved it to be incredibly unlikely to be cancerous, it needed to be removed. It was my first ever surgery, and I was a little anxious. 

“Oh, well, it’s surgery,” the normal people might say. “It can be dangerous. Of course, you were anxious.” 

But I wasn’t anxious about surgery, really. I wasn’t worried about dying or being in pain, or the doctor accidentally removing my whole breast and leaving me off balance for the rest of my life. I was anxious about how to behave as a patient. I’d never had surgery, so I didn’t know how someone who is having surgery is supposed to act. 

For instance: did you know you should not pee before going to the hospital? They have to test your urine for the possibility of pregnancy (I guess this only applies to women?) so they make you pee the moment you arrive and put that weird “gown” on. (Can we rename that? To something less elegant? Because it is not elegant.) What I’m trying to tell you is that if you’ve been fasting from food and water for almost 12 hours and you pee before you leave the house, you will be expected to pee again at the hospital. And if you can’t, the whole situation becomes rather embarrassing. After you spend 20 minutes trying to squeeze out “just three drops!” the nurse has to test your blood instead and then announces loudly to the whole surgery wing that you are not, in fact, pregnant. 

See? I didn’t even know what I needed to be anxious about! Now, my plane manifest includes anxiety about peeing! (Or not peeing, as the case may be.) How many other things in life do I not know about that are going to be on my manifest someday?!

Before you ask, yes. Everything went fine. I do not have cancer, I did not die, the pain wasn’t horrible, and I still have both boobs (I just checked.) Thank you for your concern; you’re very nice. 

WHAT’S ON YOUR MANIFEST?

But I’m also aware that I am not alone in my unusual anxieties. Some of you have even stranger passengers on your manifest, and I’m not judging! But I would like to hear about them. Partially to make me feel less weird, but more because I think sharing these things helps us realize that there really are no normal people. We all have that one passenger on the plane who really should have been escorted off by the Air Marshalls years ago. It’s normal. 

So. What’s on your anxiety manifest?

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