If you have Anxiety you better read this quickly before it gets EVEN WORSE!

Anxiety- Anxiety is trying to read and then my mind spiraling thinking about well what if someone pooped on the floor outside my office, would I be nervous when asking the front desk lady to get the janitor to clean it up? How would my hypothetical interaction with the front desk lady go, would it be smooth? Would it be awkward? In the theoretical scenario where it is my job to get someone to clean up this fake man’s imaginary shit on the floor outside my very real office. That’s anxiety.

Anxiety is tossing and turning in bed, losing sleep over the tiny, baby inkling of a possibility that the HDMI cord won’t work properly on my laptop during my presentation at work tomorrow morning, setting off a chain reaction that’ll start innocuously enough—with an unsettling 10 second delay at the beginning of the talk—but will soon spiral uncontrollably into a Rube Goldberg Machine of shit. The second domino to fall will be me accidentally opening up a file marked, “Sarah Jessica Parker” instead of “Solving Geriatric Parkinson’s”, revealing a digital shrine to my horse-faced hero. Covered in shame, and beet red with embarrassment, I’ll trip over my own feet and fall on the HDMI cord, causing the projector to fall off the table and explode, sparking an electrical fire that’ll soon consume myself and everyone else in the building, leaving nothing but grieving families and the total bankruptcy of the company in its wake.

Anxiety is not raising my hand to answer a question in class, even though I am pretty sure I know the answer, because getting a question wrong in front of other people means that I am the feeble-minded village idiot with a cashew nut for a brain who deserves to be locked away in a dungeon somewhere and fed nothing but the rejected sardines from an oily little fish supplier until I learn to prove my self-worth.

Anxiety is leaving my house and wondering, “Wait, did I forget to turn off the stove?” when I’ve only eaten cereal for two weeks, and I don’t even have a stove.

Anxiety is not wanting my team to win the game because then I’ll probably celebrate, causing my body to act automatically in accord with this display of euphoric emotion, leading me to do something weird and jerky, which will probably be captured on the jumbotron, turned into a meme, and preserved on social media until the end of time.

Anxiety is having a WebMD search algorithm in my brain that receives the input “papercut” and responds with, “rare type of terminal thumb cancer that kills by way of toxic fecal reuptake through the colon”.

Anxiety is having nightmares about doing poorly on my next social studies test on the “Cradle of Civilization” unit. The test took place in fourth grade, and it is now decades past that. I scored a 103 and was hoisted onto the shoulders of my classmates and paraded around the room as the intellectual messiah sent down to earth to recite anecdotes about the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Anxiety is hearing a momentary high pitch “ping!” in my home and then immediately diagnosing myself with tinnitus.

Anxiety is applying SPF 100 sunscreen sixteen times at the beach on a day when the UV index peaks at 3 and I am wearing a full bodysuit.

Anxiety is taking anti-anxiety medication then questioning whether or not I accidentally took two pills instead of one, and fretting over that the rest of the day. I am consumed with worry about the possibility that I took extra of the thing meant to curb my anxiety.

Anxiety is having a panic attack while volunteering to read Maisy Goes to the Library to a preschool class because I can feel the judgement in their little cherub eyes. I lose consciousness, falling out of my chair and knocking over the water play table as I collapse onto the foam puzzle piece rug. The toddlers’ criss cross applesauce positions at the reading session are transformed into front-row seats at Seaworld, except this time instead of an Orca, the performer is a Jewish man with chronically low self-esteem and a genetically-derived chemical imbalance in his brain.

Anxiety means that if my family members are traveling and they haven’t contacted me within 2 hours of arriving at their destination, they are definitely in a Taken situation, and I am now Liam Neeson. But anxiety also means that the “very particular set of skills” I possess are getting nauseous when talking to women, being utterly petrified of confrontation, and IBS, so instead of “finding” and “killing” the imagined kidnappers, I will be “crying” and “filling” the toilet with the casualties of the Szechuan Hot Pot Wars of 2025.

Anxiety is enrolling in a mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy group session and leaving halfway through the controlled breathing exercises because I just remembered that I am running low on paper towels and if I don’t make it to the store before 5PM I’m not going to be able to wipe up any of the spills, and there are always spills, when I host my in-laws for dinner tomorrow night, resulting in another tablecloth being ruined and me having to make yet another unnecessary trip to HomeGoods on a Sunday during a time when I’d ideally be experiencing hungover heart palpitations and acid reflux as I watch Premier league games and feel immense apprehension about the workweek ahead.