ANxIETY with a Lower Case 'x".

It's just weather, really. Looking at my emotions as objectively as possible,  I can judge them merely as constantly changing bits of energy that come and go, like moving clouds; Why become attached to the clouds? 

When you ask the average person how they're doing, you know they'll respond with, "I'm good." regardless of the truth. When people asked my father how he was doing he would often respond with, "Sunny with some cloudy periods."  The old man could be incredibly astute and honest when it was easier to be banal. 

I'm pre-disposed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, as well as Asperger's Syndrome. At least they told me so when I was a child. It helps to get a diagnosis for the pervasive anxiety that follows you throughout your life. It rationalizes the irrational. When I was a kid, I experienced distressing, intrusive thoughts. I still do. I once read that the difference between people who have OCD and people who don't is that people with OCD obsess over their distressing thoughts, while other folks experience intrusive thoughts, but they don't ruminate over them. When I read that, it made my adult brain puff up like an unattended Jiffy Pop catching fire on the stovetop; Why didn't anyone give me that insight when I was a child? It would have reassured me that leprechauns weren't trying to kill me in my sleep. But that's ok; I live and learn.

Mark Twain once said, "I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened." If I were to do a mental inventory of all the rough shit that has happened in my life along with all the horrifying thoughts and moments of great anxiety I've experienced, I think the thoughts and anxiety would stack higher than the actual unfortunate events. Even during this COVID period, I never witnessed pandemonium. The closest thing I saw to the breakdown of society was that you couldn't buy toilet paper for a couple of weeks, because apparently, one symptom of the Coronavirus is that some people will grow additional assholes. 

I steered clear from CNN, deleted my Facebook account, and decided that my immediate experience is ultimately what counts. The monkey mind is always present, hanging out like a slothful house guest, eating all the food in my fridge, putting its dirty feet on the table, and refusing to leave. That's fine. I've grown up, and the anxiety hasn't. The anxiety I felt as a child and the anxiety I feel now is exactly the same. It doesn't evolve like I do. It tries to be crafty, elusive, persuasive, but it's basically a lousy liar that wants me to think it has a better poker hand than mine.

Is there really an objective difference between a burst of endorphins and a spike of anxiety? Consider these two random thoughts...

"What if I get hit by a car and become a paraplegic?!"

"That barista is hot. I wonder if she finds me attractive too."  

Which one is more valuable, more important? Or, are both worthless bubbles that burst in thin air only a moment after they inflate and float for a fleeting moment? The longer I make this paragraph, the sooner I'll forget about those two thoughts I've written above. I'm just going to keep writing so that this paragraph becomes longer, and the thoughts in the space above become minimized, and then forgotten. Just another sentence or two, with enough basic words to make the paragraph substantial, and then it will be time to break to another paragraph. Don't look at the thoughts I've written above, keep reading; don't scroll up. 

Ok, final paragraph; time to wrap this up. Permit me to close with more cheap weather analogies. One day it rains, the next day it's sunny, and then on the following day, I receive a tornado warning; but then the tornado doesn't come.  Every day on YouTube, the filmmaker David Lynch posts a weather report from his home office in Los Angeles; He delivers each brief report as dispassionately as the next. Perhaps that's the point. I do my best to maintain my indifference about the mental weather, much like the actual weather; to live as detached from it as possible. It's a discipline, and I continue to practice, but not too hard or too seriously.