SSshh

My take on anxiety and destructive brain noise. I draw on personal experience and struggles to make this a relevant read.

SSsshh

Can we please have quiet on set, quiet on set?

Enter my mind - loud raucous and cheer.

 

I have been suffering from an extreme case of anxiety over the past few years and only recently did we (my mind and I) acknowledge that we’ve got a problem. Prior to this acceptance we always thought this was part of growing up and a regular feature of the transient state adolescents often find themselves in. I’ve grown up listening to the sounds of the world or so I thought, the sounds emanated from my world - my head. It was all brain noise; utterly meaningless and haphazard. But most of all it was loud enough to consume my ears to the fullest so that at my absolute worst, I could not hear anything but myself. Not blind to the world around us but deaf to it? To have everything around you speed past - multiple realities and scenarios playing inside one’s mind is both taxing and somewhat depressing. Depressing because it leaves you void of the present. You lose time with people around you right there in that moment and are deprived of the possible love and happiness exchanged in those moments. This is anecdotal to a little boy (or girl -feminism chaemps) standing eerily close to the edge of the platform and watching a train blaze past him and if he were to slow the train down in his head just enough to squeeze one train carriage at a time within his viewing sight - there’s a whole new world to see through every window. Different people, possibly related, expressing a whole host of emotions. Slow enough to see but not slower still to absorb. Anxiety for me has been a race of sorts, a horse race. I can hear my mind gallop and every stride that this tireless horse takes, the racetrack seems to grow lengthier - my mind’s happy while I’m weary and tired over having acquiesced to competing in these horse races. Anxious and scared, I concede to my destructive mind.

 

There is a plethora or rather an entire menu of silly, seemingly innocuous things that trigger this oh so wonderful sensation of anxiety. For me personally, it’s people. Over the years I’ve found myself overly eager to reach out to people and offer to carry their pain, their burden in exchange for a pseudo sense of security that I’ve afforded myself where I tell myself “I matter to them”. But what happens once my “patient” heals, I ask. They’ll no longer need us and so they’ll move away, I answer. Cue my anxiety. I guess there’s still a bit of *A’level* breathing inside of me, after all, weren’t those the best of times when we felt that our friends, our memories, our true love and our attachment with people around would last forever. Best friends have been reduced to a routine “HBD” “what’s happening” once every year. Memories have been reduced to mere after thoughts and well our true love? I guess he/she wasn’t our true love after all, eh? Just hormones I dare say. Shut up Mohib, it was good while it lasted okay??!! - I can hear my friends argue in the back. The real sucker in all of this is attachment. And attachment is the protagonist in what I like to call the best friend syndrome. We grow crazy close to our best friends and it’s all warm and fuzzy in this little space you have crafted with them. But as strong as this bond feels, its inner underlying fragility comes to the fray when your best friends start to grow close to other people. What starts as “relaxxx everybody needs to have friends” usually ends up in “He’s changed/she’s a different person now” with the ultimate act of throwing in the towel and feeling sorry for yourself being the removal of one’s profile picture off of WhatsApp. This otherwise mundane and frequent series of events intensifies when you suffer from anxiety. Nothing has piqued my anxiety more than the fear of losing my best friends or being side tracked by them. The feeling of not mattering to your special people anymore is particularly damaging and of course encourages the mind to start exploring and fishing for freshly prepared straight outta the oven insecurities. “I’ve been replaced” “I’ll always be the one who gets replaced” “People use me” - thoughts like these consume the mind and attribute to a whole lot of destructive brain noise. And all of a sudden one starts feeling insanely unsure of his/her self. We’re not sure anymore how to behave in a group of friends or what to say or how to say it. Alienated, are we? We start searching for our worth in the eyes of people and more often than not our mind had already decided beforehand that we don’t matter. We yearn to feel loved again but our mind cruelly shuts us down saying our time’s past. All of this ushers in a sick bout of anxiety and our world appears to come crashing down. Our friends were our world.

 

The sensation itself that grips us when we feel anxious is perhaps the only part that’s worse than the accompanying insecurities themselves. Growing up, I combatted asthma and while I have outgrown (can you *outgrow* a disease? - young doctors on strike again) that s**t, it’s only fair that an episode of anxiety leaves me breathless on the floor. Gasping for air, I have felt my ribs incarcerate my lungs and close in hard on them. Every short breath I took, the oxygen burned my insides. And so I make my breaths shorter. The shorter the breath the more my back hurt. So all in all it’s a pretty sucky experience.  I recently called a friend in between an ’episode’ in the hopes that she could help me get through the torture and all I could hear myself do was breathe hard into my phone and say in a broken pained voice “I can’t lose you” - clearly my fears are few but they’re very consistent.

 

We all harbour insecurities inside of us despite the outside world marveling at our ability to soldier through our days. Every once in a while our mighty walls come crashing down leaving us bare and naked. I guess the road to recovery, at least for me, starts at the crossroads where I need to accept that people are transient. They come and go. And the road to recovery, at least for me, ends the day where I LOVE MYSELF enough to hold onto me rather than hold onto others. Anxiety makes us do silly things in a bid to have our friends like us but the idea is to think of yourself as your ultimate best friend and love yourself.

 

So if you, like myself, have suffered from shitloads of brain noise and anxiety then reach out to your loved ones; that’s you. Look after yourself and tell your mind to SSSshhh. Keep it quiet. Things get better. I’m anxious to get better.

 

Reviews

[Ardra]

If our brain would listen and remain Shhh.... what a wonderful thought ...
i certainly would love to have that ability to aks my brain to shut up and to let me do my things without 1000 thoughts popping now and then...
:)