Anxiety as a Gift

There’s always that thing about loving yourself. Something about you being unique and how you’re a wonderful person and how the world would be missing out on a tiny sliver of beauty if you weren’t in it. How everything about you is perfect, even the flaws, especially the flaws, because that’s what makes you you. If we were all perfect than everyone would be just average. And that’s boring. The spice of life is having a myriad of people you admire and love mixed in with a myriad of dipshits that you’re not sure how they actually function. Or something like that.

It’s especially hard to love yourself or see any benefit to the basket-load of flaws we all have. Sure, we get the trash about loving yourself but how do you really love yourself when you’re, for example, depressed all the time? You are you because you’re depressed but it’s hard to find comfort in that. Does depression even have any positive traits?

Someone who’s not depressed might posit that the depressed person might be able to enjoy the good times to a greater degree than someone who doesn’t suffer. After all someone who’s borderline thinking of offing themselves might appreciate a day where even the smallest good thing happens, but if you told anyone with depression your theory about their “gift” they’d probably want to punch you in the face. That’s if they’re able to get out of bed and even find the anger and motivation to punch you in the face. They’re more than likely just to say, “Must be nice to have that outlook,” and sulk around.

I’m rambling about this as a person with periodic depression (periodic is progress, right?!) and I don’t even know if this is true or not. Maybe I do notice the tiny positives more than others? Maybe not. Who knows; I don’t know how other people feel.

But this is about anxiety and not depression. With my new supervisor role my anxiety has been about a 8 or 9/10 perpetually. And you know what I learned? It kind of is a gift in a way. All of that blabbering about “flaws being gifts” might actually be somewhat true, at least in my recent experience with anxiety.

I’ve noticed my two supervisor peers are much more laid back than I am. The caffeine doesn’t help one bit, but even without that I’m sure I’d be stressing about the smallest work issue I have to deal with. Maybe it’s their experience, maybe it’s inherent in their personalities, but they’re chill with the job. Stressed, sure, but never visually anxious about anything, just constantly fed up with the job. A contrasting example: yesterday I was literally pacing the office because I’d have to be somewhat in charge of two crews instead of one. It’s like 20 people! And I have to talk in front of them all try to not make an ass of myself and what if I forgot some important detail of the day and I’m going to doom myself and my job and people will hate me because of this oversight! I’ll let one thing sneak by mean, fuck the day up, and I’ll be a failure. The single reason why 20 people at work had a shit day; because I let something go wrong on my watch.

The other supervisor try to help. They’ll say, “You’ll do fine! Stop worrying so much! You did great yesterday, and today is easier, so just chill out.”

Back to them being laid back. They’re on top of their supervising games but often things can slip by them that I’ve noticed — and stressed about — about an hour earlier. Since I’m stressing out about so damn much at work, endlessly dooming over every tiny possible thing that can go wrong, I do seem to catch problems earlier than they do. And since anxiety has the natural side effect of making you more proactive with minimizing the doom issues before they even manifest, well, this just sounds like someone who’s good at planning, doesn’t it? Almost like a good trait for a supervisor to have.

It’s not all roses though; my fear does create hundreds of false positives, things that could be a problem but somehow never really become problems, and this causes me unnecessary stress. Its a bad signal-to-noise ratio. A bunch of anxious static that sometimes has a message embedded but often times does not. This is why people usually command me to “Chill the fuck out bro,” or something along similar lines.

It’s a balancing act and one I’m not very good at. How do you even filter out legit problems from the ones you’re imagining? How can you prioritize legit doom scenarios from the ones that are far-fetched and simple regular anxiety running amok in your head? Fuck if I know — I’m just a blogger dude without answers — but it is cool to have this slight realization that my anxiety does have its uses, now I just need to learn to use it. By making me freak out over real/imagined scenarios it keeps me on my toes. Some of those imagined turn out to be real problems and when that happens it makes you look smart or foresighted or creative. Not that I am; I’m just so fucking terrified of any/everything going wrong that the real scenarios are a natural subset of all the crazy shit I imagine, all thanks to ANXIETY. I’m dooming, I’m glooming, and I’m looking for ways to save myself the hassle of having everything spiral out of control. And sometimes the imagined doom and gloom is real and, hey, I know exactly what to do because I’ve stressed out about it hours earlier.

Now about the usefulness of depression; here’s an idea I have…Ha! Just kidding. I don’t have any idea how depression is a gift. It just seems there, making life a bit shittier than what you’d expect life to be like. Friendship ended with depression; Anxiety is now my best friend.

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