Anxiety about Anxiety
Have you ever tried and failed at something so many times that you become afraid to try again? If you have, I hope you’ll be able to relate to this. If you haven’t, well… fine, good for you I guess.
I read this poem as a teenager, in a self help book called The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Teens by Sean Covey. (Yes, it’s the kids version of 7 Habits of Highly Successful People by Stephen R. Covey and yes Sean Covey is Stephen Covey’s son.)
The goal of this poem is to help you recognise your patterns, learn from them, and change them. It’s great in theory but it backfired on me. Because having anxiety means that you take away the wrong thing from a poem like this. Anxiety will do anything to make sure you won’t be hurt again. And it gets stronger and smarter every time you get hurt and it learns really, really fast. If I had to walk down that sidewalk Anxiety will arrive waving red flags and caution signs and printouts of statistical data. Because Anxiety can’t tell the difference between a hole in a sidewalk and a soft comfortable chair outside a cafe because it’s on the sidewalk. And sidewalks have holes. That means anything on the sidewalk could be a hole. And Anxiety will do anything to make sure you don’t fall in again.
If my anxiety had to write this poem it would go something like this:
Having been in therapy for 7 years learning how to manage Anxiety, Depression, and traits of Borderline Personality Disorder means that I have reached a whole new level of recovery now. I’ve had so many good, Anxiety-free days that now Anxiety itself is the fear. I’m so afraid of getting into that mind space again that I’ve slowly and unconsciously started avoiding situations that might bring her back.
For a while I avoided dating entirely. Because with dating comes the possibility of rejection, of looking in the physical and metaphorical mirror and trying to figure out what’s wrong with me, what made the other person leave, what made them not like me at all.
The other thing I began to avoid was being regular at the gym. After a knee surgery that kept me bed ridden for 3 months and using a walker and cane for 6 more months, I couldn’t face the fear of getting hurt or feeling physical pain again.
The third thing I started to avoid was “eating clean”. I had lived with so much anxiety around calories and gaining weight for over a decade so I just didn’t want to do it any more. I was tired of being anxious about everything I ate, craved, or enjoyed. I had been anxious about my weight for over a decade. I was challenged by a therapist to just not check my weight for a week. And I didn’t. I loved it. It was so freeing. So I started to indulge. If I wanted to eat a whole bag of 15 snicker minis in one sitting I did it. If I wanted to drink beer every night of the week, I did it. If I wanted to every meal to include chips on the side and a fizzy beverage and a dessert after, I did it. I relished in no longer giving a single flying fuck about calories for the first time in ten years. It was liberating.
This liberation also helped me use food as a coping mechanism during back to back losses from 2020 to 2024. I lost my cousin, then my grandfather, then I cut off a toxic person from my life, then I had knee surgery, then a close friend stopped talking to me, then I gave up my dream career, then I had to cut off another toxic person, it was all too much. Grief was bad enough, I wasn’t about to worry about calories right now.
But then, wouldn’t you know it, came the consequences of my own actions. Not exercising and overeating meant that my body changed. My body changing made me more self conscious, amplifying my social anxiety overall. I started to become afraid to be seen, to emerge into the light of the real world after dressing a body I didn’t recognise in clothes that didn’t fit. My short term comforts were having long term repercussions. For a while I tried to embrace it. Embrace the new me and love her regardless. But I couldn’t. Not because I hated her (for a change) but because I couldn’t recognise her. I would catch reflections of myself and wonder who that was. I would see pictures of myself and struggle to see myself in that photo of that person. Who was she? Surely she wasn’t me. She was a girl who had gone through some really difficult years and took it out on her body because it helped soothe her mind. I didn’t want to be that person any more. I didn’t want to see that girl in the mirror. The girl who had had so many hard years. I wanted to see myself.
I battled with the idea of Body Acceptance. Of course it means that you should embrace and love your body as it is. But does it also mean embracing a body that you’ve abused simply to ease your mind? What if chips and dessert were drugs and alcohol? Would that be the same thing? Of course not. So why was I treating this as if it should be accepted? My body had changed only because I had mistreated it. Surely that’s not something to learn to love? The last time I had gained weight was when I comfort ate during four extremely difficult years in college when I was young and undiagnosed and homesick. And this time it was from comforting eating during four extremely difficult years of grief and loss. This body was not my default body. It was my post stress body. Or maybe I’m a bad feminist who hasn’t yet confronted her deep seated fatphobia. Who knows. All I knew was that I wanted to recognise myself in the mirror again.
So I decided to make a change. But before I actually acted on the decision I had to confront the dreaded Anxiety about Anxiety. I was afraid to bring up those old anxieties about my weight, my body, about calories, and physical pain. Most of all, the fear of failure. I was so afraid to feel afraid.
So I journaled and I wrote and I wrote and I journaled. Step one was articulating the fear which was that the first (and only) time I managed to lose 10 kgs in one shot, I did it in the worst way possible. I starved myself, and berated myself, and pushed myself more than once to a breaking point to lose weight. It wasn’t about strength or ability or wellbeing. It was ONLY about thinness. I would have nightmares about eating carbs. I would go out to lunches and dinners and sit there watching my friends eat dessert or have a beer, or both, while I drank water. All of it was driven by fatphobia and self hatred. My main fear was that I would have to put myself back into that mindset to do this again. Or that I would slip back into it despite my best intentions. That if I tried to do this without relying on self loathing I wouldn’t be able to stick to it, because I had tried that before and failed.
So I wrote and I journaled and I journaled and I wrote. Writing everything down allowed me to address each fear individually:
It now remains to be seen if all this grand journalling will actually be effective. I’m one week into a training program I used to be genuinely afraid of. Afraid to fail. Afraid it would bring Anxiety back. Afraid that it would make me hate myself even more. But I’m facing the fear of my fears now. We’ll see how it goes. Wish me luck.
If you struggle with anxiety or eating disorders, please consult a mental health professional. It doesn’t have to feel this bad. You can get better and help is available if you’re willing to try.
If you’re based in Bangalore you can make an appointment with my psychiatrist Dr. Ravi Prakash here. There are more resources at the Live Love Laugh Foundation.
