(Games – Jamie Grace)
Anxiety is the worst. Especially when a lot of barely believable stuff has happened in your life…because like no kidding what I am afraid is going to happen seems so out there that how could I possibly believe that it was an incredibly real and imminent option…except that very similar things have actually happened in real life so I can’t logic my way out.
When contamination OCD was my biggest issue at least I could hold my breath and wash my hands and recognize that the part of getting sick that scared me most was the social aspect and I really probably could figure it out if I absolutely had to…but when your fears are more relational or outside focused there is a lot less you can do. I’d been working hard to not let fear shrink my world…and then I found out what I was really afraid of (being found) had happened…and it took a while for me to be willing to even try to un-shrink my world again…because now it felt all the more real, plus the stakes got higher – instead of fearing for my life I feared for the comforts of life.
So sometimes when I hear the tiniest sound in the night I panic…and because humans are not ideal thinkers on minimal sleep, sometimes like today the anxiety doesn’t want to go away. Sometimes I can comfort myself that I was probably a neighbor coming back from a party or taking out the trash or something, but other times I am fully convinced something bad is going on. Because why wouldn’t the bad people find me and decide to hurt me again on a stormy April night? What if creepy mustache guy shaved off his mustache to go in cognito and has been hiding from me in plain sight? I don’t leave my home anymore without clothing I’d be mostly okay with being seen in, but sometimes I leave my blinds open a little bit and I don’t always dress for success at home…’cause I live by myself so who really cares if my bra strap is showing or I’m wearing leggings without pants? Although on the first one, I don’t know why our society cares so much about bra straps (or really even underwear) showing a little – it’s just fabric, so why does it matter if that fabric is connected to my first layer of clothing or my second? I mean, considering some bras are one layer of fabric and some are two or more layers, really what you are seeing while part of the bra might be more layers out than the totality of layers the next female is wearing…
The anxious what-if is horrible. And I am so thankful for people who might kinda look at me like I’m crazy but who will still love me. I appreciate the people who know enough of my story to know that what I’m scared about makes no sense but even though I didn’t do anything wrong I don’t have a good reason to believe that correlates with nothing bad will happen to me. The grace they give me for my anxiety is such a blessing.
A journey through trauma & triumph 