Anxiety
Today like most days I woke up feeling anxious. Huh, I scrunched my face up when I typed that out. Something about the word ‘anxious’ that makes me cringe a bit.
Maybe because as a feeling it’s kind of broad. Maybe because it’s so common and I still hold onto a sense of being unique or special. Maybe because the softness of the word’s sound doesn’t match the dread.
So this is something I’ve been grappling with, alongside much of the English-speaking world at least, for years but which I’ve avoided dealing with I guess for reasons of masculinity and associated tendency to dislike labels of any kind.
I’m special and strong, remember? And so I can’t be merely anxious. How soft.
Maybe let’s describe the feeling:
A fluttering tense discomfort that is bothersome but not so stressful that it causes me to act, usually associated with having to do something I’ve put off (because of the feeling) and so has a pretty gnarly compounding effect.
Etymology
The Wiktionary entry for anxious is interesting.
Anxious is related to the Latin word angō which once meant choke, strangle, throttle – like the Ancient Greek ἄγχω (ánkhō) – but became a descriptor for physical and mental pain.
That choking feeling matches up, in my experience. It also aligns with a relatively persistent discomfort in my throat and -term fear of having my throat touched.
The ability for words to ring true over thousands of years of change and to still ring true in a super strange period of history where all information is available all of the time and everyone can communicate with each other instantly is kind of wild. Words are awesome.
But so what else? Well, I’m feeling a bit better I must say in the half hour I’ve been writing about this.
Lately I’ve been like properly looking at some of this stuff and trying to overcome it because of how it’s actually a really annoying barrier for me to get some shit done.
Like I found it easy enough to pretend like nothing’s wrong and carry on coping by ignoring when the choking – which hey that feels like a better word, feels less like a brand of silk sheets than ‘anxious’ – was affecting me in school or with some aspects of work. Sure there were consequences but they were never that bad. Now though I have some important Life Things going on and about which I’m anxious which means a kind of neglect that I hate seeing since at the best of times I’m aware of just like the state of potential decay in which all things sit and these should be enjoyable, important Life Things.
So yeah, that’s where I’m at I guess.
I’ll figure it out.
2022 fiction word count: 12,031
Today’s effort: 251