I am feeling a lot of free-floating anxiety right now.

It’s like a state of continual mid-level panic. Not an actual panic atttack, per se, although one could happen at any moment given the right stimulus.

It’s more a sense of just being freaked out by life in general. I can’t seem to exit this mode where practically everything provokes a “panic and flee’ type avoidant response and each one of them raises my background anxiety level and ratchets up the pressure on the death grip some alien hand seems to have on my heart.

And it makes it so hard to cope.

The worst part is that I don’t seem to have any resistance left in me. I can’t fight back. The fear and avoidance come and I just melt and give in instantly.

It’s not even a decision.

What happened to my defiance? Where did my rage go? How did I lose all the traction under my hooves that was so vital in my pushing back against this bullshit?

Somehow, I lost contact with whatever dry land I had forged in this vast ocean of turbulent ocean within me and once more I am drowning within myself and at the mercy of the tides and the storms.

The brave and proper thing for a smarty pants type like myself to do at a time like this is to realize the folly of this eternal and infinite n-space retreat and turn to face the ghosts that haunt me, and try to make some kind of peace with them.

But I can’t seem to do that. I try and I just end up further freaked out. It’s like I can’t handle anything any more. I have lost all basis for self-control and the only way I know how to cope with that is to bury myself in my video games as deep as I can and let the mental engagement and energy that takes bleed away the energy of the anxiety and give me some measure of calm.

The closest I get to actual defiance is these attacks of nihilistic rage where I hate everything and want to utterly annihilate everything around me in order to make some goddamned room for me to think inside this echo chamber in my mind.

---

Well now that was ironic.

Here I am, talking about being anxious and panicky, when the phone rings and it’s somene I know and they are freaking out about something.

And at first my reaction was to panic too. I was not in the frame of mind to be able to handle it. My friend was freaking out and confused and my intitial, cowardly instinct was to pass the whole mess off to Joe.

But he ain’t home. And I am glad, because it meant I had to pull myself together for my friend and try to help him calm down by being the cool and gentle voice of reason.

I am pretty good at that, when I can get a grip on my own bullshit.

And you know what? After helping him, I feel a lot calmer!

And that’s just so… me. The need to be there for someone else combined with the somewhat protean nature of my mind combined to make me transform into a calmer version of myself and now I feel a lot better.

The anxiety is still there, but now it’s at a distance.

So once more, I can do for others what I cannot do just for myself. I find that highly amusing and even sort of lovable, in a mildly crazy way.

It reminds me of when I was still at UPEI in the early 90’s and planned on becoming a practicing psychologist. Not a psychiatrist – that required medical school and I had no illusions about being capable of that.

I could probably have handled the learning. It’s the practical I was sure I could not do.

And all I really wanted was to be people’s therapist. To be there for them, to listen, to do my best to understand, to help them through their own forests of issues and gently prod and push them into releasing all the pent up bullshit that was holding them back and making it hard for them to cope.

To me, that seemed like the best possible thing to do for a living. Helping others like that would have been extremely satisfying to me. To be able to strike back at the forces of depression and madness seemed like the highest calling to me, and that was the job I could imagine liking so much that it was a joy to get to work every day.

And my experiences playing (very) amateur therapist for friends on an ad hoc basis have comfirmed all of that. Doing it gives me a glow of pride and fulfilment and a feeling of having done what I am supposed to be doing on this Earth.

So who knows. Maybe I should chuck the whole writing for a living thing for now and go back to school to become some kind of therapist or counselor or whatever.

Of course, there is nothing keeping me from just declaring myself to be, if not a therapist, then someone who is willing to listen to you and help you the best he can for, presumably, a hell of a lot less than an actual professional therapist would charge.

I know there’s websites where people more or less crowd-source therapy. Where you can sign up and be either therapist or patient depending on how they feel that day.

I would appreciate that flexibility of role and lack of formality and commitment. And it could be very good for me to help others.

It would certainly lend desperately needed meaning to my life. And more than that, it would go a long way towards making me feel like an asset to the world instead of feeling like I am nothing but a liability.

But I am not a liability. I spread sunshine. I make people happy just by being around. I make people laugh and make their day better.

And not everyone can do that. It’s quite the gift.

And thanks to today’s events, I can finally feel that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.