Boxed in, I think is an apt way to describe what it feels like to live with anxiety. You’re boxed in, because you don’t want to move outside of it, well that was the case for me.
Once that first event happens, the first time you become anxious, or “have a bad day” you want to do anything you can to not repeat it. So you put up a wall, or two, or three. You do whatever you can to keep yourself safe. When these events happen in early childhood, those walls become thicker and stronger, to keep you safe. On the positive side, if there even is one, is that your inner child, inner self, does what it can to keep you safe. So we can’t hate or be mad at ourselves for doing what we feel is best at the time.
What happens when you keep building these walls to keep you safe, you eventually box yourself in and shut everything down. Which is what I was doing. Shutting everything down, and off, my emotions, my feelings, and gut intuition, till all you are left with, is the logical mind. That is always thinking up new ways to keep you safe. Running off of an old script that may not even be true anymore. But that doesn’t matter to the logicial mind, it’s in a continuous loop of old patterns and ways of being. Where we don’t want to change. We don’t want to stir the bee-hive. We get it in our heads that it’s not safe. This world is not safe. Eventually we end up not living anymore. We basically just go through the motions of existence. Trying to survive each day. Until the end of our days. It seems morbid and bleak. And for me, it was. That was the life I was living…
So what can we do when we get to that state of being? I think awareness is the first step. Being aware of this is what you are doing and it’s not the best option for us. Not anymore. It may have served us well in the past, and we can be thankful for that, but now we can choose to live a different way. Sometimes it’s not easy to be aware and see this within ourselves. We become so engrossed in our minds and surviving that we don’t see anything outside of it. Sometimes we can be shown things from others, if we listen to them, and then it can hit us in the face like a stack of coins in a sock.
This is where I find myself today, working to let go of the past. Accept it was what it was, and that I no longer need to hold on to it. I no longer need to live like that. I no longer need to be afraid of the world. I can slowly take out a brick from my walls. Slowly chisel away at them. And allow in the sun and light into my dark abyss that is my inner world. It’s scary and exciting all at the same time. Learning out ourselves and who we truly are. Not who we think we are by who we became living in fear. It’s a slow process. But it’s worth it in the end. Being free. Being unhindered. It’s something we all, living with anxiety, secretly dream for. To no longer life that way. To no longer be like that.
To be free. To be happy and really feel it. I look forward to that day and I hope you all do as well.