Spirals ꩜
It is very easy to get stuck in a spiral. Any thought can be the start of one if I follow it enough to notice. From what I'll have for dinner tonight, to the idea of death.
When you wander alone in your brain for long enough, when you have lived there and only there, it becomes almost impossible to see the outside of it.
No matter how hard you try to live in the same reality everybody else seems to be in, your default will always be the prison that is your human brain.
I wonder how many people find my behaviours weird, not knowing anxiety affects them majorly. I wonder if I would make more sense to them if they knew how my brain is wired. I wonder if they'll see me differently and therefore, treat me differently.
I wonder if anybody ever notices how much of my actions are affected by that. Do they excuse my inconsistency, over-explaining, hours of silence, and minutes of "zoning out"? Do they notice I'm not in my body a lot of the time? Do they assume I'm awake when I'm clearly not?
Do I make sense to anybody? Because it doesn't seem like it.
I have this need of people I love to know me, the real me. To understand my actions.
It is very isolating to be misunderstood by everyone. The less you are understood, the fewer connections you have with the outside world, the more you live inside your head, which brings you back to being misunderstood. The cycle continues.
I am one with my anxiety, we are not separate entities. Anxiety is a pattern of thinking, it is how my brain is wired. I cannot separate it from my consciousness for it is part of it.
My anxiety and I go up and down as one entity. "It gets worse" when I tend to follow the tightening of the spiral more and more. And "it gets better" when I tend to be bounce out of a spiral into a new thought. The factors which affect these ups and downs might be external, but I believe my brain chemistry is the only controller.
I am my anxiety. It is just the way my thoughts are structured. whether or not I follow the spirals is what determines if my anxiety gets bad. Panic attacks, physical sensations, fits of freaking out and crying, are all mere symptoms of the way I think. They are debilitating, but they're not the main debilitating abnormalities.
The silent spiraling into insanity, the lack of seeing a way out, the forgetfulness of any important event outside those spirals, that is what is debilitating.
John Green does a really good job explaining this pattern of thinking in one of my favourite books Turtles All the Way Down. I think this lies in the fact that Green himself has OCD.