A couple of years back I wrote a post about the night my depression died. I was standing, in the middle of the night, up because of some insomnia thing. Somewhere near the end of what had been an extremely relaxing, deeply calm stand, I suddenly felt this buzz of anxiety, and then the smokey despair of the chronic depression I'd been struggling with all my life. I felt it flare up, and then I pretty much felt it burn away, replaced by a deep sense of calm.
This isn't to say that after that day I never felt depression again. But I can say, that it's never driven me, or controlled me in exactly the same way since. I visit that murky path from time to time, but I know it's growing over more all the time.
Last week has been an extremely difficult one. My landlady gave me official notice that she's going to take back my apartment. Doesn't look, from what an experienced tenant's rights lawyer told me, that she has much chance of pulling it off. Still, I've been obsessively anxious about this for a week. It's been difficult to sleep, work, and very difficult to meditate. I've been in imaginary rental board hearings now for a week, and any actual rental board hearing is months away.
Today I stood. I heard my most compassionate voice reassuring me "you don't have to be driven by this obsessive anxiety. You don't have to be driven by this obsessive anxiety. You don't have to be driven by this obsessive anxiety. Obsessive anxiety helped you once. But it's not helpful to you anymore. You don't have to be controlled by this." Then I thought, who is this you that the voice keeps talking to. And I realized that I didn't want to think of myself anymore as the helpless person, who needs reassurance from a secondary voice. I thought "wait a minute. I'm the strong voice that's reassuring me. I'm not the child who needs reassuring anymore." So I started being this voice and I started hearing myself say: "I don't need to be driven by obsessive anxiety anymore." The voice got stronger and started to feel like more and more of a core part of my identity. Until it was.
For a while, just after that stand, I sat down. I started thinking about a time in my life when maybe that obsessive anxiety did help me. I thought of my childhood, always on attention. Always expecting my mother pounce any moment with some overblown irritation of some sort. I needed to be obsessively anxious, it felt like, to match her obsessive anxiety.
But she's not here anymore. This is my life. I'm not always doing something wrong. I'm often doing something right. Something healthy. Something smart. Something interesting. Something delicious. I don't need to be worried ALL the time. I don't need to be controlled by that worry.
This doesn't mean I'll never worry anymore. But I'm about to lose my home, one of the worst feelings in the world. And I'm up to it. I'm up to the fight of protecting myself and my son. And maybe, eventually I'll even feel secure enough to let my landlady have it. I'll see, once i'm more used to this knowledge.
