"Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power. A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy."
- Tryon Edwards
I know exactly what caused me to feel anxious today. It was a letter from someone who thinks I owe them money (and until my attorney tells me otherwise, I will continue to insist that I do not). I know that this letter was meant to cause me anxiety. I know it should not, because I have wonderfully smart and kind people helping me deal with these anxiety-givers, but I just can't seem to help it. Every time they leave me a voicemail, my intestines tie themselves into yet another knot. I sometimes wonder if they sleep well at night, knowing perfectly well that their correspondence will ruin someone's day. I have never understood that. I mean, I have never understood what kind of person it takes to work a job that is all about upsetting the lives of others. It is even worse to think that these particular people pretend to care about the people they end up harassing. But what they are really doing is latching onto people who have just gone through a horrible experience (like have their apartment catch fire), some kind of catastrophe. People who are at a loss as far as what to do. They take your hand, promise to take care of you, tell you not to worry, then wait until two days before Christmas to call you up and claim that your insurance company never took care of the things they were supposed to and you are now in debt to them for several thousand dollars, oh and P.S. how soon can you pay us in full?
I tried everything I could think of to push the anxiety out of my mind (entirely, not just the forefront--the last thing I need is nightmares about owing money). I tried cleaning, working out, playing videogames, watching Foyle's War, reading, cooking, baking. I only had one more trick up my sleeve, but it happens to be the one that worked: writing.
It never fails to amaze me how much better I feel about life, no matter what has happened, once I've written it down. It isn't just the act of writing. It is the fact that you can't help but work some of it out while you're writing it down/typing it out. You are devoting time, effort and thought to pulling it from all the corners of your brain. I once wrote something along the lines of it being like pinning insects on a board. Not the most appealing analogy, but it really is like stabbing those little, irritating bad thoughts and pinning them in place. They can't flutter around your brain and mess with you if you've got the lil buggers nailed down.
Granted, there are some things that you need to just sit down and have a good cry about. There are some things that only the passing of time can help. But today's solution, to the problem of these evil little bastards trying to make me feel bad about something that they won't provide evidence to me for, well today's solution is writing it down and putting out into the ether that these people can go fuck themselves (special thanks to my uncle for encouraging me to tell them just that, even though I haven't).
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