When Self-Caring Doesn’t Take The Anxiety Away

The anxiety was sitting in my throat, in my stomach and in the back of my eyes. I was choking on the words that would speak into existence what I was thinking - I was anxious because I felt guilty for being happy. I had unshed tears that spoke to the stress of being pulled in opposite directions — I was overwhelmed by the anxiety and sad that I felt this way in the first place. The pit in my stomach, this spoke to the reality that old habits die hard and the strong ties between my anxiety and my body were still there for however faint they’d been recently. 

I was a conglomeration of feelings. In my mind was a woman with a shield in front of her face trying her best to ward the worst of this off. I journaled. I spoke positive affirmations at every threat to my happiness. I sought out manageability in all that felt unmanageable. I did what I know helps and then I ran out of things to do. 

So, I sat. 

I sat on my bed and stared at the television playing Friends. I gave into the feeling of anxiety and shed tears that like a pulley made the knot in my throat rise up until the words flowed like a waterfall. 

I sat with the reality that self-care doesn’t always take your anxiety away and maybe it was never supposed to. Sometimes it simply helps clear the room to make space for the feeling. On another day, probably two or seven months ago, I would have called a day like this a failure. I would have looked at the list that on paper was meant to make me feel better and COMMAND + SHIFT + X’ed (or strike through shortcut on Mac) it all. It didn’t make me feel better so therefore it didn’t do what it was meant to do. All along I’d just been incorrectly defining the role of self-care in my own life. 

Now, I call it a success that it made me feel. Something doesn’t have to be around for a specific length of time for the change to be drastic. Take falling in love. Or, going from numbing to feeling, where the thawing starts out slowly and then all at once. From that moment on there’s just no going back. The added sensitivity to the “good” feelings — happiness, joy, general peace with the present —  doesn’t come alone though. Feelings are feelings. No good, no bad, they bring with them as much complexity as they do simplicity.

What no one tells you about the rug that you brush things under is that it forms lumps that hurt your back the longer you lay on it. The pretense of anxiety that magically or instantly self-resolved courtesy of a self-care habit had always been just that, a pretense. A convenient lie, a negotiated truth that made bad days bearable and offered false (and sometimes, honestly, necessary) hope to make it from Point A to Point B.

Where true hope rests for me lately is in a few words — I can do hard things.

Hop scotching from one high to the next by way of numbing was never hard, it was just comfortable. Comfortable and safe aren’t the same. 

Self-care habits are meant to make you feel safe and sometimes they’re meant to make you feel safe enough to figure out how to cope next. Lately, mine make me feel safe enough to feel. It’s an ode to the period of life I’m in and how many triggers I’ve slowly removed from my life to get to this point. 

The self-care habits also make me feel safe enough to want to challenge myself to believe in a day when allowing myself to feel won’t be the fifth thing on the list, like maybe it can be the third.