When you ask the question, is anyone else having a tough week, the answer is always yes. There are always people out there having a hard week, a hard month, a hard year. And most likely many of theirs are worse than yours.
When I look at my own problems and anxieties about the future, I realize my problems are not the worst problems. Yes, I’m worried about money, about making good paintings, about finding a life partner, the environment, and eating a credit card’s worth of plastic every week, to name a few. But the anxiety makes me feel like all the problems are rushing in at once for my attention.
The trouble with anxiety is it lives in a world of its own making, parked somewhere between the present and the future- never real enough to grasp. The subject of its focus is never as important as the feeling of dread or mindless spinning of mental wheels that it causes. I could be as concerned about making rent this month as I am about eating too much cheese at dinner. My mind and body never know the difference in scale because anxiety.
The white noise of my anxious thoughts whirls around my real problems, magnifying them, making them seem bigger and unsolveable. Sometimes I feel it’s a smokescreen hiding the thing that could actually make me feel better.
So what is behind that smokescreen? My fear that I cannot trust an unknowable future? Or that I somehow don’t deserve good things to happen, and so they won’t?
The phrase getting comfortable in discomfort also comes to mind, a recommendation from a past therapist.
But also, it feels like there is more to this story. Maybe somewhere floating in the mist is a fear of joy in the face of so much sadness, grief, and loss in the world. Is it the fear of leaving people behind, or being left out by choosing the lighter path, one that accepts reality for what it is without judgment?
What if, like a candle in the dark, our joy can light the way for others? Is joy even a choice?
I haven’t done enough therapy to know the answer yet. What do you think?