I never mocked people with anxiety or depression but I was not quite sure I believed them either. Those conditions seemed to cripple a certain type, I thought, and maybe some of us (a lot of us) just needed a name for our demons. That was until my thirties, which is when it all seems to go to shit anyway, and I found myself tangled in a mess of sheets, panicking, ocean-weight collapsing my mind and lungs. They call it an anxiety attack. Panic attack. I have had a few more since that night.
What brought it on? The nominal erosion of certainty. The brutal normalization of car payments, and higher grocery bills, and demands both real and imagined. The disintegration of civility. Fabricated news stories. Fighting with tweens about screen time. “What ifs” shelling a confidence I never even questioned. Clowns leading my country in a wicked parade. And this trickle of groundwater cleaved and cleaved until the entire shoreline collapsed. Onto my chest, apparently.
Kipling, speaking for me when my mouth is filled with tidewater: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same”. Imposters. Ironically, the rest of that poem is about clinging to yourself (or your convictions) despite the turbulence, but when your faith is in question - not your faith in something but the ability to trust at all - most everything slips as soon as you wrap your fingers around it. And when we are short of breath, convinced we have it all wrong, maybe facing the phantom is exactly what we need. Wave a hand through the air to touch…air. Fucking imposter.
Can you believe in uncertainty? Belief is choosing to trust in what we need or in what resonates most with our variation of reason. Uncertainty is certain, or it is at least close to true. That can be unsettling, but for me, I would rather be true than believe in imposters.
I believe, help my unbelief.
