Sweating the Small Stuff

The trouble with anxiety is that sometimes you completely know what’s going to trigger it. For example, if I am getting ready to go out to, say, a party, odds are good that I’m going to get a little, shall we say, nerved up. But other times? It strikes when you’re not even looking, and the thing that sets you off is …

Well.

So today, I was sitting at my desk, working away, when my pen suddenly died. No big deal, right? I’ll just get another pen out of my desk drawer.

I opened the desk drawer.

The desk drawer was a DISASTER. Total mess. Nothing where it should be, just piles of crap crammed in there and askew.

My chest tightened up.

I immediately closed the drawer. “I don’t have to worry about this right now,” I said, which has in the past worked to forgo one of my “I AM GOING TO FREAK OUT RIGHT THIS MINUTE AAAAGGGGHHHH” moments.

I went back to work. Every couple of minutes I would look at the drawer. The drawer leered back at me. It seemed to chuckle. “I am a MESS!” it announced gleefully.

“I don’t have to worry about this right now,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I don’t. It’s fine. It doesn’t even MATTER.”

“HAHAHAHAHA” said the drawer.

I MAY, at that point, have pulled the drawer out and emptied its contents onto the office floor.

I may ALSO, at that point, have taken one of the antacids that I keep in my desk for precisely this reason. (And then wished for a Xanax,  but I’m trying to quit.)

I don’t like things to be messy. The problem with this particular desk drawer is that I have a propensity for opening it up about a quarter of an inch and then dropping things into it and slamming it closed. Now, however, everything I had dumped in there was sitting on the floor, so I sat on the floor with a garbage bag and weeded through it.

Nearly everything went to the dumpster. Some things that I might actually need later got tossed just because they were guilty by association. Once the bag went into the dumpster and the drawer was back in the desk I found that I could breathe normally again.

For a couple of minutes.

Until I thought: You know, I bet the catch-all drawer in the kitchen is a catastrophe.

But this is how it goes. This is how the anxiety works. You get caught in a loop and then you can’t function. It’s one of the reasons I work REALLY well from home – the effort of trying to pretend like I’m not always one step away from a panic attack over the NOTHING? Is enormous and also, very tiring.

However.

The more I talk about it, the more I let people know the depth of the crazy (and I’m comfortable with calling it that in reference to myself – I mean it sort of affectionately, not in a derogatory way) is this: I keep finding out that it’s NOT JUST ME. There are a whole bunch of us out here in the world, trying to get by, being triggered by things that we have to do: speaking in public, maybe. Or going to parties. Or sometimes, being confronted with disorder or new people or unfamiliar locations or whatever it is.  Honestly, though I realize that not everyone gets so anxious that they forget to breathe (oops), I do also recognize that we all – all of us – have the things that make us uncomfortable … and that it’s okay. It’s totally all right if balloons completely wig you out or you’d rather pound nails through your hand than speak in front of a group.

I get it. Because while I like balloons and (weirdly) am usually okay with being in front of a group, I also know that the sight of a messy drawer can cause me to become unhinged. And while that might not be everyone’s version of normal, apparently it IS mine.

I think I’ve finally learned to be okay with it.