Anxiety brain is a jerk.

 My anxiety is ratcheted way up right now. Some of it is the fact that this election cycle feels like doomsday. Some of it is the fact that the number of Covid-19 cases in my county has started creeping up. And, some of this craptacular thinking is just my brain misfiring and saying things like "We aren't going to be able to pay our bills!" which is completely false and irrational.

I meditate. I drink herbal tea. I wear stuff that is supposed to ground me. All it does is keeps the volume down around 7 instead of being cranked up to 11 with the knob ripped off. It didn't help much that the neighbors were acting weird last night. It didn't help much that the other neighbors had a screaming match, again. It also doesn't help that we're coming up on the leading edge of the holiday season.

Anxiety brain vs. Depression brain is not a thing. They team up so I am practically vibrating with tension while at the same time filled with enough existential dread that I could turn into a character in a horror movie that is featured with the shaky camera work who is constantly running away from the viewer shrieking. It is literally that irritating and disheartening. 

I try not to let it seep into my writing. It happens anyways. I tried to use LARP as an escape and it seeped into there as well. It robs me of my inspiration when it comes to writing new material with even a smidgen of confidence. It leaves me staring at my handcraft projects with this sense of hopelessness that they're all just 'nothing' as my Mom once said about a project that I was working on to cope with my paternal grandfather's dying. I handed it to her as she sat at his bedside as a gesture to offer her comfort. She took it, began working on it and later told me it was nothing and that the yarn was poor quality, not knowing that every thread of it I had spun earlier in the year on a drop spindle.

To say the least, that comment haunts me. It was cruel and unsurprising during a moment when I was in deep pain. Anxiety brain drags it up with the worried questions if the people who are going to receive what I make are going to look at it and see something worthless. Depression brain tells me that there's no point to trying because it's going to be found lacking no matter what I do. This struggle is what keeps me from writing. This struggle is what keeps me from putting myself out there and promoting things that I am good at, like tarot reading.

So, like I said, Anxiety brain is a jerk because it keeps dragging up the verbal daggers that my parents put into my back at vulnerable moments.