I met a young woman who has lived through some pretty horrible experiences, but her life is starting to go the way she wants. She told me she’s just waiting for the next blow. I could empathize completely. In the Apple show Shrinking, there’s a character named Brian whose motto is “Everything goes my way.” For most of my life, I knew the inverse to be true for me. Nothing went my way. Any time anything started to go my way, the situation was to be treated with suspicion and doubt. The common phrase is “waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
I wrote a post about optimism recently, which is highly related to these ideas. I also wrote a paid-only post about the fear of loneliness, which went into detail about why I started to fear loneliness specifically, and the effect that had on my life. This post is more general. It’s about living in fear. Fear of some vague threat that will bring everything crashing down around your ears. In other words, this is a post about living with anxiety.
The phrase “fight or flight” leaves out the third option: freeze. I freeze. When something bad starts to happen, my gut clenches along with the rest of my muscles, holding me taut. I am caught in indecision about what action to take, overwhelmed with thoughts and emotions, leaving me numb and stiff. Sometimes people who don’t live in my head misconstrue this reaction as indifference or even disgust, while inside I’m flailing.
Freezing is a trauma response. It happens to those who have been so overwhelmed by what they’ve suffered before that they become conditioned to stiffen and go numb, to dull the pain. Never mind that freezing is itself a kind of pain. Brains are weird.
Suffer enough bad luck in your life, and you may start to freeze when things are going well. Too well, you tell yourself. Things never go this well for me. And so you may start to stiffen and numb in preparation for whatever shoe is surely about to drop. You’re caught in a double-bind. Frozen in the good times and the bad. How can things do anything but spiral?
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my whole life changed when I began to love myself. When I began to love myself, this fear of the other shoe dropping slowly began to lift. When I began to love myself, I resolved to take care of myself, which is not a commitment I’d ever made before. Knowing that I would take care of myself, surely life had to start going better for me. It couldn’t very well go much worse.
I have anxiety. My panic attacks started in middle school. I had no idea what was happening to me, and it took me a long time to learn how to manage them. I learned to breathe, even as my brain was telling me my body was shutting down. I learned to control my body so that I wouldn’t hyperventilate and pass out. I learned to move through the panic, even if only in a very small way.
After I resolved to take care of myself, I went on a self-help spree. I learned there were a lot of small ways to move through panic, to improve my situation. Control my breathing, for one. Then, once I’ve found a measure of calm, speak to feelings rather than getting defensive. What I’ve started to do doesn’t really qualify as fighting, fleeing, or freezing. Maybe there’s an even lesser-known fourth option, of regaining control of oneself. That’s what I intend to practice.
Part of that is to stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for the other shoe to drop is the frozen action of someone completely out of control of themself. A person in control of themself recognizes that things will not always go poorly for them, and that always expecting and assuming the worst only causes self-harm.
There’s no magic cure to anxiety. It’ll always be there in one form or another, whispering that things will go poorly. But as an individual with free will, I can either choose to believe it, or I can choose to roll my eyes and bat it away like a pesky gnat. I can learn to move around it, or through it, if it refuses to get out of my way.
A Substack writer I admire recently wrote a post about his experience with anxiety. I always find it fascinating to hear how different people experience similar issues.
Wonderful post, Lorelei. Thank you for sharing. 💛
You make me want to open up about my anxiety. I relate to your freezing because that's what approach my boyfriend takes - totally shuts down, practically plays dead. My anxiety makes me very productive - always a busybody - but that's a form of flight I think. Anyway, thank you for honestly sharing.