Being someone who has suffered from chronic anxiety for well over a decade and who is writing a humor book about anxiety is a bizarre experience. So much of what I’ve gone through has been decidedly less-than-funny, but now, as part of the writing process, I’ve been scrolling back through old posts I’ve written on the topic with a new perspective. I mean, I hallucinated tiny banana-shaped people sitting in my linen closet and telling me they could help me sleep. (True story.)
Come on. That’s funny.
But re-reading these posts is doing something else: it’s making me remember just how rough that (extremely long) time period was, because it’s easy for me – a person who is now capable of sleeping through the night without bolting straight up in bed at 3AM, wide-awake and sobbing because DEATH IS REAL – to forget how out of control my life used to feel, because I simply couldn’t rely on my own brain to do what I wanted it to do.
It was bad. And now it’s better. Not perfect, of course – I’m still too tired, too stressed, too short with my kids, too worried about the future, too fixated on controlling every tiny iota of my life – but the difference between then and now is bigger than I could have ever imagined way back when I first turned to Kendrick and said to him, “I need help.” So I thought it was worth revisiting the journey – just to remind myself where I used to be, and how far I’ve come.