Anxiety

Coping with the unknown is one thing. Living up close and personal with challenges that threaten instability is different. Especially those that threaten personal instability.

I remember walking across campus from church. We had a special choir rehearsal, and I had a test the next day. A test that I was most uncertain of regarding success or failure. I recall wondering if I should continue studying or getting to the rehearsal. I chose choir because music calms me. Actively participating in music calms me more. My test anxiety returned on the walk back to the dorm.

Similar memories persist. The dread of possible failure clouded much of my time in undergraduate work. Did I really understand the concepts and how they fit with related topics? Could I work and create with those concepts? The doubt pulled breath from my lungs and emptied my core. The feelings were real. Physical hollowness became reality.

By graduation I lessened those bouts of anxiety. I began to know I understood the material and lived with the unknown results with more equanimity. In my papers and essays of those years I explored the unknown with spirit. I grew inventively and posed new questions to explore. Education was expanding horizons not limiting them, and the hollowness morphed into a sense of fulfillment. Of possibility.

In graduate school, possibilities grew exponentially. Understanding of new material may have been temporary but it built a platform for more exploring. It just did. That’s when I knew learning was rooted behavior. It supported more learning. Logic expanded. Understanding systemically leaped to seemingly unrelated topics. Creative juices were magnified.

This rootedness in logic and problem solving became a career pattern in later years. It was all related to the wholeness of logic and facts. It informed me of facts and logical conclusion. All of this was verifiable as well. Solutions were shared among many problem areas only convincing me of how related life was throughout.

The unknowing periods, however, created anxiety that propelled me past insecurities to find workable resolutions. Anxiety returns still and reminds me of the hollowness; but now I know what follows – logic, solutions and satisfaction.

No longer is anxiety the enemy.

March 19, 2025

 


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