My journey through pain - 24. Chapter 24 - Don't feel

It’s been a rough week. Whether the fact that I have felt really anxious since Monday is due to some sort of cycle in my brain, or whether it was triggered by an outside event which I have not yet identified, I don’t know. I haven’t sat down to write in my journal since then, but I think it’s important to not give up on writing on here because it has helped me in the past and sometimes it gives me perspective.

When anxiety rises to the point that it eclipses every other emotion, it’s hard to think straight. I have found that it’s much harder for me to just think when I am feeling so anxious. Even simple decisions, like picking what I want to have for lunch, appear unsurmountable. For the last few days, I have been feeling like this and I’ve been desperately trying to find some way to deal with it, some way to make things more bearable.

I think I have come across something which has helped me and which made yesterday a little bit more bearable. It’s kind of a mental way to fight the crippling waves of anxiety and the negative emotions they bring with them. It’s very hard, but it is something to hold onto. It has become sort of my mantra for the last day and a half. I say to myself:

I don’t feel anything except the good things, if they come. I don’t feel. I don’t feel anything except the good things, if they come.

The thing with me is that I always give an emotional dimension to everything that happens throughout the day. I may have already talked about this, but it still holds true. Everything has an emotion attached to it even if its banality is overwhelmingly evident. Getting dressed in the morning: emotion. Watching a sunset: emotion. Eating a banana: emotion. The problem I’m having is that, since right now I am so anxious and depressed intermittently, most of the emotions I tack onto everyday events are negative. This means that negativity just piles up and keeps growing like a horrible snowball as it tumbles downhill. It is exhausting to have to deal with so many negative emotions all the time and that the only thing that happens is that my anxiety grows, locking me down in a vicious circle where I begin to fear everything around me and I grow ever more desperate, seeing no way out.

I was actually quite desperate a couple days ago when this thought first occurred to me: what if I, through an effort of will, stop adding emotion to the daily minutiae of life? I don’t mean that I should somehow remove emotion from everything, since that is impossible, but that instead I try to truly recognize that events that happen throughout the day are, for the most part, not intrinsically linked to an emotion, be it positive or negative. Events just… are. If I can somehow teach myself to look at events like looking at the morning sun, having breakfast, taking a shower, and all of these little things without obsessing about how I feel as I do them and whether each of them holds either positive or, much more frequently, negative affect, then I might give my mind a chance to rest.

I have been trying very hard to apply this and, surprisingly, it has helped me. It did yesterday: taking my dog out for a walk in the evenings has come to signify a very great deal to me, since it was while taking him out for a walk that I first experienced calm weeks and weeks ago. However, that very same association taxes me greatly because I keep on expecting to feel something similar to that wonderful epiphany every time I take him out to poop and that is not only unrealistic, but also emotionally tiresome. Yesterday, therefore, I tried to tell myself… What if taking my dog out is just – what if it’s just taking him out? No emotion is intrinsically part of the action itself. It is just taking the dog out. I might enjoy it, or I might not, but that depends on the circumstances once the action is being carried out. It is different to preemptively ascribe an affective dimension to the action and then stress out over whether it is positive or negative.

It worked. I just took him out and came back home – and then I forgot about it. Which is what I desperately want. I want to go back to the way I used to be before the panic attacks and the anxiety, the way I imagine most people are: doing their daily activities without obsessing over the emotional import of each and every one of them. Before my emotional problems became so strong, I remember that I used to do things without really thinking too much about them. Taking the bus to work was just taking the bus to work, not a symbolically difficult and negative emotional experience which had to be overcome each and every time. Preparing dinner was just preparing dinner because I was hungry, not this grand and exhausting declaration of defiance against the depression which wants me to stop taking care of myself and not eat or whatever…

I’m not sure I’m making any sense since I don’t know whether this phenomenon of attaching very strong emotions to everyday activities is something only I do or whether everyone does it, but I strongly suspect that most of us don’t. I have been very diligently reminding myself of this new mantra: I don’t feel anything except the good things if they come. By repeating this, it is easier to separate emotion from activity and to just get through the day. I am still open towards positive emotions, and in fact I have found that through this separation of the daily routine and my own emotional turmoil, I am able to function with less effort and less pain, which in turn has a positive effect in shifting the balance of emotions swirling around in my mind from completely negative to somewhat tolerable.

I only have a single day and a half-ish of data on this new technique of mine, but the results are promising. It’s not easy to keep this in mind all the time, but it is yet another tool I can maybe add to my toolbox to help me overcome this rough period in my life. It clears my mind a little bit and allows me to do things which will be beneficial for me in the long run, like yesterday, when, through constantly and willfully not allowing myself to obsess over what I was feeling, I was able to reorganize my bedroom into a much more effective layout such that everything is very neat and orderly. It’s a tiny thing, but it’s very significant to me, because living in a neat space is emotionally reassuring to me. I would not have been able to reorganize the bedroom had I been associating the reorganization with very strong emotions like I normally would have. I simply did it. I kept telling myself: there is no intrinsic emotional dimension to this activity. You can choose to give it one, or you can choose not to.

I’m hopeful that this technique will prove helpful in the long run. I wonder, does anyone else experience something similar?