Member-only story
HUMOR
Anxiety: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
There’s mental illness, and then there’s mental illness.
Everybody agrees on things like psychosis and schizophrenia. Seeing people who aren’t really there? Mental illness. Anorexia and bulemia? Mental illness. Repeated suicide attempts? Mental illness.
And then there’s anxiety.
I’m used to being made fun of for my habit of spiraling into worst-case, DEFCON 1 scenarios. Do I like being mocked? Of course not. Maybe you think it’s funny, but I don’t. I’m experiencing real terror.
To paraphrase Viserys Targaryen, it doesn’t matter if the source of my fear is real or not. All that matters is my perception.
The human mind is a bitch. For me, every twinge of pain is cancer, every weird heart thump is a clogged artery.
Eye twitch? Parkinson’s.
Stuffy nose? Nose tumor.
I became a spinning ball of terror when, as the furnace guy was leaving my house, he mentioned that my hot water expansion tank is sagging and it needs to be replaced. (He mentioned this because he was also hoping to get my plumbing business. Alas, this is not to be. But seriously, thank you, D.J. from Gene’s Refrigeration. No, I’m not concerned about the dead mouse in the…
