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Let me take you on a weird and personal—but hopefully enlightening—journey into my brain to reveal my innermost thoughts and try to explain how my anxiety manifests. How it triggers from the smallest most innocent seed until it wracks my every thought and consumes my every moment.
I’ve briefly touched on this before, but I figure a better way to walk you through it is with an example. And what better example to use than one that is going through my brain right now?! So yes, this is tit-for-tat. Quid pro quo. You get a peek inside my brain, and I get to use you, my imaginary reader, as my impromptu therapist to perhaps alleviate the circular thinking in which I am currently trapped.
It all started this morning. The housekeepers were coming. In fact, they’re here right now. And like every good British person does, you have to clean before the cleaners come! God forbid the people you pay to clean actually have to do any cleaning, or possibly see how slovenly we really are.
So as I frantically rushed around the house this morning picking up after the kids, throwing away piles of trash, picking up clothes from the floor, and so on, I noticed that my clean clothes were still hanging on the treadmill. Yes, like any good exercise-focused family our treadmill doubles as the place we sort laundry before it (eventually) makes its way into the closet. My clothes were there… but my wife’s were not. “Strange,” I thought to myself, for whoever hangs the clothes usually does both sets at the same time. “Maybe she just hid them away somewhere because the cleaners are coming,” I naively thought.
I made a mental note to hang my clothes up later that day, and figured I should ask my wife where her clothes were so I could hang hers up too—only to find out she had already hung hers up. Cue alarm bells. Klaxxon sounds are blaring in my brain and I force a neutral look onto my face and a calm “oh okay no worries” beyond my lips. Meanwhile, my brain…
Why did she just do hers and not yours too? Did you piss her off? You must have pissed her off? Or this is her way of pulling away! She’s turning you into her roommate! Roommates don’t hang each other’s laundry that would be hella weird, and she thinks it’s weird to touch your clothes because she doesn’t see herself in a relationship with you even slightly. And even if she does, then she didn’t hang your clothes to send you a message of some sort, probably that she thinks you’re not pulling your weight around here. You should do more chores. Yes I know you do a lot already and you’re exhausted, but you need to do more and STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT IT JESUS. It’s gotta be something, there’s absolutely no reason for her to defer from her usual behavior. I mean, when did she hang up her clothes? You didn’t see her do it. Was she hiding from you? She must have done it yesterday during work, or when you were out. She was sneaking around. You should keep a closer eye on her so you know what’s going on, that way you’ll know why she didn’t hang up your clothes. Perhaps you could check the security camera footage it’s for the best…
On and on it goes. And it has been going since about 8:30am this morning, soooo about four hours now. I know multiple ways to solve this. I could ask her, though she might think I was a bit paranoid/weird/accusatory for asking her about something so innocuous (and therein lies another brain spiral). I could just assume Occam’s Razor, and the simplest explanation is likely the reason: time & effort. She had like six shirts to hang, while I have a mountain of stuff piled up there. Not only is that one-sided, chances are she was in a rush. You know how I know that? We’re ALWAYS in a rush.
Unfortunately though, it’s the simple things like this that send me down this anxiety rabbit hole. Catastrophic thinking they call it. I like calling it doom spiraling. Like Alice going down the rabbit hole. I’m still hoping that writing about it will help, but it hasn’t yet. Maybe once it’s sat with me for a while and I find some random pictures to throw in here to break up the wall of text. If not… well, there’s always my dwindling supply of Xanax.
Thank god for drugs, eh?!