The Relief of Letting Go and Living Fully Despite My Anxiety

“We only live once, Snoopy.” ~Charlie Brown

“Wrong. We only die once. We live every day.” ~Snoopy

I am an anxious person. I haven’t always been though. When I had my first child, fourteen years ago, it was the week after my father died. My son was born and went right to the NICU where he spent the first fourteen days of his life. In that moment, I changed. I’d already had one miscarriage. I couldn’t lose anyone else.

Man, life is fragile. I spent the next decade making sure he played on the swings at the park, but not too high since he could fall and break his neck. We always took him to the river or the lake, but no swimming. There are amoebas in the water. (Funny and crazy, I know.)

I now have two children who are fourteen and nine. Just a couple weeks ago, we went to the zoo. I had to talk about not leaning on the railings; you could fall in an enclosure. I am exhausted. The worry never ends.

I am a mom, a wife, a daughter, anxious, neurotic, controlling, and scared. I never meant to be that helicopter mom. I had great ideas about how I would parent my kids. My husband and I always talked about how we would raise teenagers and what their curfews would be, but being in the middle of it, I’m terrified. I live in a constant state of panic and fear.

I constantly worry I’m having a heart attack or a stroke. I worry my kids will die. I worry I will die.

During the early months of the Covid-19 lockdown, we completely shut off from the world. Guess what? We all got Covid-19, except my nine-year-old. My elderly mother (who lives with us) got it too. I even sanitized groceries. We have no clue how we got it. We are all fine. Thank goodness. I know not everyone is as lucky.

Every pain or sniffle is a worst-case scenario. Have you ever seen the movie My Girl? I am totally Veda Sultenfuss.

It took several years, trips to the emergency room, shaky relationships, and whole lot of self-discovery to figure it out. I even got divorced because of it. My lack of confidence, yet another sad part of anxiety, made me think I wasn’t enough. I caused my divorce. Thankfully, we are remarried. He sees me, he sees the moments I am fun and carefree, and he helps me work through my anxiety. Old Bob Ross reruns help too.

So, what is the lesson here? I am not in control of a single thing. (Mind blown, I know.) Life is full of terrible things, wonderful things, heartache, tears, laughter, death of parents, even children. It’s all those moments in between that make life worth living.

If we hide because of fear, we miss out on those moments. We miss out on a chance to save a memory we could pull out of our little brain file when we’re seventy-three and watching the snowfall on Christmas morning when all our kids are grown up.

It’s really scary, letting go. It’s like walking on a tightrope. You see what could happen, but you just walk, because you know you’re not fully living if you sit out, and at the end of that walk, you realize how fast it went by. Either way, it will go by. It’s up to you how you spend that walk. Frank Sinatra says it best, that’s life.

Get in the conversation! Click here to leave a comment on the site.

The post The Relief of Letting Go and Living Fully Despite My Anxiety appeared first on Tiny Buddha.


Read More
Source
Location: USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

20 Powerful Self-Care Quotes to Help You Feel and Be Your Best

Image
Hi friends! I decided over this long holiday weekend to give myself a break for some much-needed self-care, which I imagine we could all use right now. We’ve all been pushed, stretched, and challenged this year. We’ve all given our all, done our best, and perhaps wondered at times if it was good enough. That’s the thing about difficult times—we often make them so much harder by expecting a lot from ourselves, pushing ourselves, and beating ourselves up when we fall short. We expect ourselves to always be happy. Or productive. Or confident. Or present. Or there for other people. We expect ourselves to always be at the top of the game even if we sometimes put ourselves at the bottom of our priority list. But we can’t possibly be all of these things all the time, because we’re not perfect, we’re human. And to be human is to be messy, inconsistent, and full of contradictions. To have days when we knock it out of the park and days when we stare at the park from our window. In pajamas. ...
Read more

Here are nine ways to improve your emotional regulation skills:

Image
Here are nine ways to improve your emotional regulation skills: Choose your mantra. ☯ Decide what you will say to yourself the next time your frustration bubbles up to the surface. Have one or two short mantras ready. Talk with friends. 🗣 Friends are support systems. A good talk can dissipate stress, make you feel understood and give you a good outlet to vent.  “Find your tribe or community where you can share challenges, laughs and strategize on how to solve problems you have in common,” Kris says. Practice self-compassion. 💝 How often do you give yourself a soft place to land in your mind? Self-compassion is the practice of treating yourself as you would a best friend, and when you are kinder to yourself, you are kinder to others. Exercise and eat nutritiously. 🏅🥗 Take care of your body and your mind will follow. Write in a journal. ✍ Give your thoughts and feelings a safe place to come out. Practice mindfulness meditation. 🌅 Practice a nonjudgmental stance to things you are...
Read more

12 basic rules to find love

Image
12 basic rules to find love Just because the whole world seems to obsess about romance during one day in the middle of February, doesn't mean you have to. For happy singles, it's a good excuse to eat chocolate. But if Valentine's Day has you thinking about finding love, the holiday could be a good motivation to start. Our experts offered these 12 tips to boost your chances: 1. The ‘You’ll find love when you’re not looking’ approach may be wrong. That’s like saying, “You’ll find a job when you’re least looking for it,” said Pepper Schwartz, a relationship expert and sociology professor at the University of Washington. It’s possible, but rarely happens. “For the most part, people who wait for a job are unemployed,” she added. “For me, it’s just an excuse for being scared to go and put the effort in. Yes, it happens, but no, it’s not a good strategy.” Schwartz does agree with the underlying sentiment of that saying: Don’t be desperate. Put the effort in to find someone, but do...
Read more