I don’t look like the anxious ball of frazzled nerves that I am internally. I can usually shake these horrible thoughts if I’m occupied, but if I’m left alone with nothing but my brain to listen to, the sick feeling in my stomach gets unbearable and it’s a lot harder to brush off bad thoughts when they’re manifesting physically, too. My mind will generously show me vivid scenarios where my boyfriend is cheating on me, or where my friends are talking about me behind my back, or where I get fired, or where my loved ones are murdered, or where I accidentally drive my car off a bridge. How can you live a carefree childhood when you’re seriously concerned about something that’s (probably) decades away? Not the way I was going to die, mind you just the sheer fact that it was going to happen. When I was a child, I remember running to my mother when I was supposed to be asleep, freaking out about how I was going to die. For someone who isn’t actively suicidal, I think about my death a lot for absolutely no reason. If that’s not bad enough, I also have wickedly awful intrusive thoughts that accompany my worries. I jump between living in the past and the future and completely ignore what’s going on in the present (unless it’s bad, of course then I’m thinking about ways it could get worse). Anything remotely embarrassing that has happened to me in the last 30 years will be on replay in my head at the most inconvenient times. I worry about what’s going to happen 10 years from now as much as I worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow, and not only do I have severe anxiety about the future, I also obsess about the past. Will I lose my job tomorrow? My relationship? My loved ones? My mind? My life? Who knows! It’s one giant, terrifying mystery that literally keeps me up at night. It’s almost like I’m psychic, except my “premonitions” are incredibly vague and could be based on fact, or seemingly nothing at all. Ironically, it always seems to get worse when things are going well, probably because when something does go wrong, I can actually relax and be smug in my confirmation bias, telling myself “I told you so!” It means I often have a horrible gut feeling that something bad is going to happen, but I don’t know what, or when, or why. You can call me a Cynical Cindy, a Negative Nancy, a Debbie Downer, a Pessimistic Patty or a Gloomy Gloria, but I usually refer to it as my generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).
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