Anxious as a Mutha

 "In all the good times I find myself longing for change, and in the bad times I fear myself." This line speaks  to me. It strikes a chord in my soul. It's from the song Shallow (Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper) and whenever I hear it, I am floored by the accuracy of it. When things are good, I am a mover and a shaker. I'm always looking towards the next goal and not content to just be .  It's a flaw that I am trying to work on, ha. When I'm feeling anxious or down, I am flat out afraid of myself. I get so fearful that I won't be able to pull myself together and will go back to the full-on hell that was my life a year ago.  A year ago, I was in free-fall. A year ago, I had no idea how far down my bottom was, nor how hard it would hurt once I hit it. Now that I've scraped, clawed, and climbed my way out...I'm sometimes afraid of the height of being up...and also my potential for descent. The panic, the despair, the anxiety, the hell...my hell...all sta

Do you ever just have days where all of your demons knock on your door and force their way into the light of your usually peaceful existence? The illumination reveals their every gruesome feature and casts shadows onto your very soul. Every now and again, we all have bad days, but some just drain you and leave you feeling breathless. As demons don't tend to schedule their visits beforehand, you're taken by surprise and utterly unprepared to play host to their demands. When all of the demons come home to roost, I am outnumbered and overwhelmed by them.  If I'm honest, though, some of them never really leave. They're perpetual residents in my mental space, taking up precious real estate and leaving limited room for more desirable tenants like peace and contentment. When fed enough stress or negativity (or an unholy combination of both) they grow until they use up all of my emotional bandwidth and dominate my thought patterns. Tonight I am trying to evict some of them and

Franklin D. Roosevelt famously claimed during his first inaugural speech that, "the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself." While profound, and certainly transcendent beyond Franklin's era, I would argue that what most of us actually fear is not fear itself, but uncertainty. Fear of the unknown is at the root of many of our fears, even if it doesn't seem so on the surface. Not knowing keeps many of us awake at night. It is human nature to seek answers, hypothesize, and confirm. This need-to-know is how we made it out of our caves and into modern civilization. Our insatiable thirst for certainty gave birth to the information age we're currently living in with near-instant gratification for, well, everything.. If we have a question, we "Google" it. If we need to drive somewhere new, we use GPS navigation in real time. If we need to contact a loved one, they can answer a call or text within seconds. If we need something, we turn to Amazon and their c