Tired of living a few steps ahead of my own life
and what if most of what I am preparing for never happens?
A note before you read: This is about my relationship with anxiety and imagined catastrophe, but I am writing it for anyone who has spent their days bracing for disasters that rarely arrive. If you are like me, then first for all, I understand you.
Someone from work suggested a book that I am currently reading and only done with the first chapter, but for every five minutes I find myself pausing more than I read. Constantly I kept asking myself about the difference between real danger and imagined catastrophe. And in that chain of thought, I got stuck with an uncomfortable realization about how small my problems are. How absurdly cushioned my anxieties look when placed beside lives that have known actual risk. Bodily risk, existential risk, the kind of risk that does not live entirely in the head. By any means I am not saying mental endurance is not harmful, but imagined problems are.
For the past couple of hours, I have been asking myself this question: Why are you doing this? Spending your days bracing for disasters that almost never happen? But let me tell you, I hesitate even writing that, because I know how easily it can turn cruel. I certainly do not want to diminish my own suffering or shame myself into gratitude. I know that anxiety is not cured by being told that others have it worse. But there is something I want to write about, something I need to understand myself, and here I am.
I have lived most of my life in preparation mode, always scanning, always anticipating, always imagining what could go wrong. My mind runs simulations constantly, because I think vigilance is my most important duty to survive. This habit certainly did not appear out of nowhere, but has been with me since childhood, and it kept me safe most of my life. I understand it is an old survival strategy as well, because some people learned to prepare by storing grain and some learned to prepare by storing imagined futures. Fortunately or unfortunately, I fall into the latter.
But the difference is, back then it felt intelligent and responsible. I learned early that if you think far enough ahead, if you rehearse every possible scenario, you might be able to soften the blow when things go wrong and you might suffer less later by suffering a little in advance. Except that “little” turned into a lot as I grew older. All this preparedness became a way of living when it was supposed to be a tool or mechanism. That in turn made my nervous system stay switched on, and my inner world became crowded with futures that never arrived. 99% of what I worried about did not happen, but the cost I paid was huge. I paid in tension, in worry, in tiredness, and in a constant sense of being mentally elsewhere.
Reading about someone whose days were shaped by real danger, by existential trauma, by physical endurance, by the possibility of actual harm, made something clear that my anxiety is responding only to imagined moments, and more often I am neither responding nor reacting, but always rehearsing. Do that intensively and extensively, then you realize that the problem with living in rehearsal constantly is that you never arrive on stage. Life keeps happening while you are preparing for it with days passing and experiences blurring. Moments that could have been inhabited fully are instead filtered through a haze now. When this rehearsal is not being put into reality, the problems are largely internal, living in the head, feeding on the little attention that’s left. The “real” challenge is that they can continue to live endlessly because they mostly do not demand any immediate action from the reality.
That made me realize something about what this takes from me. It seems like it takes a toll on my mind, but what is happening in the background is that it is equally taking a toll on the body. Because our nervous system is not designed to treat hypothetical futures as not emergencies. Yet that is exactly what I have trained mine to do. Every uncertainty becomes a potential threat, and every decision branches into a dozen imagined failures. It is exhausting, seriously. It makes me tired in a way that sleep or any amount of rest does not fix. Tired of always thinking, always anticipating, always standing a few steps ahead of my own life, tired of mistaking anxiety for foresight, tired of living as though something terrible is always just around the corner, even when the present moment is perfectly fine to live.
This is where the book I am reading made me feel a bit of gratitude for my life. A sense that perhaps I owe it more presence than I have been giving it. Because this life is the only thing I know for certain that I have. I do not know if there is rebirth. I do not know if consciousness returns in another form. I do not know what happens after death. All of that belongs to belief, speculation, spirituality, and maybe philosophy. What I do know is that I am alive now. That time is passing now and experience is still available to me now. But unfortunately anxiety is stealing this time without me recognizing it because my time is filled with moments where the body is present but the mind is elsewhere, busy running scenarios that never materialize or come to reality. To put it plainly, it is a tragedy to spend a finite life preparing for disasters that mostly do not come.
I do not know how to solve this, because this is all I know since I can remember my life. I do want to find another way. But I still worry. I still overthink. I still overthink my overthinking. My mind still gravitates toward worst-case scenarios with perfect consistency, and I am a conscientious person, so that is an added extra trouble. I have always been running around the question of how do I control my anxiety, but now I am starting to ask what kind of life do I want to be present for? I find myself wanting something simpler than happiness because happiness feels too abstract and easily commodified. What I want is to experience my days without constantly bracing against them. To enjoy time not as something to be optimized or protected, but to be lived. I want to sit inside moments without immediately trying to escape them mentally. I want to trust, just a little, that not every future needs to be pre-lived in my head. I want to loosen the vigilance a little to let life surprise me. I cannot remember when I last felt something surprising.
What I have learned reading stories is that fear has many forms, and that not all of them deserve equal authority. I am beginning to suspect that my anxiety is less about danger and more about control. My way of trying to outthink uncertainty and of believing that if I imagine every possible outcome, I can somehow protect myself from pain. But is that even possible? I clearly do not know how to un-train a nervous system that has been learning this pattern for three decades. I do not know how to stop scanning for danger in a world that sometimes does contain it. I just need to acknowledge uncertainty without letting it trap every minute of my day.
Most importantly, I want to stop missing my own life while trying to protect it so ferociously. I want to learn what it feels like to live in the world instead of in my head. To be here, in this moment, in this body, in this one life that I know I have, but with a little more trust that I can meet whatever comes without having already lived it a hundred times in my mind. I am nowhere near to knowing how to get there, but my dear, do you?
Yours in thought,
Yana