What I used to call anxiety

One Monday morning in May, the internet was down and I couldn’t get any work done. The urgency came anyway, a hurry in my body with nowhere to go.

A year earlier I would have called that anxiety and left it there. That morning I sat with it a little longer, and something else showed up. The Monday before had felt like an emergency, and my body was replaying it. The feeling wasn’t about that day. It was about the date.

Naming it loosened it. That was the first time I noticed that “anxious” might be the wrong word.

What was actually under the word?

Over the summer I kept catching the same thing. What I called anxiety was usually several feelings at once, all of them too big for me to tell apart.

Some of it was plain fear. Some was desperation about where my life was. Some was fear of people. Some was pressure, a lot of it put there by me. Some was a fear of running out of time, which Sundays have carried since I was a kid.

On one hard day in August I wrote down what I felt: disillusionment, apathy, hopelessness, some anger. My throat felt closed. It was hard to put thoughts into words. And on top of all of it, I noted that my anxiety had gone up. Looking back, the anxiety wasn’t a separate feeling. It was an alarm, telling me I was getting overloaded by something I hadn’t named yet.

Why did the name matter so much?

Because a feeling with the wrong name can’t tell you anything.

If it’s all “anxiety,” there’s only one thing to do with it: try to make it stop. But fear and anger want different things. Grief wants something else again. When they’re all in one bucket, none of them gets heard, and nothing changes. Not my habits, not how I see things.

At the end of August I said it out loud in a voice note: I’m not as anxious a person as I thought. The bucket had held anger, despair, hopelessness, rage, and even excitement.

That last one surprised me most. In September I ordered something I’d wanted for a long time, and right after I felt overwhelmed and anxious. It was excitement, with nowhere to land. (I wrote about what that does to my head last week.)

Does naming them change anything?

It changed the order things came in. In May, after weeks of grief and hopelessness, the fear came up. Then anger and wanting started showing at the edges. The feelings came in layers, not as one mass. Naming the top one seemed to make room for the next.

The kind of name matters too. Calling a feeling a problem keeps me stuck. “Something is wrong with me” goes nowhere. “I feel scared” or “I feel desperate” is a feeling I can stay with, and then it moves.

What do I do now?

When the anxiety starts to feel like too much, I do my best to remember to ask whether it’s an emotion I’m not recognizing. Fear? Anger? Sadness? Too much excitement? Sometimes the answer is clear in a few seconds. Sometimes I can only narrow it down.

Then I try to sit with it instead of acting on it. One day at the end of September I felt strong fear. The old me would have been annoyed at myself for feeling it. This time I let it be fear.

I’m not saying anxiety isn’t real. For a lot of people it is a real condition, and it deserves real care. This is just what I found under my own use of the word. Some days I still can’t tell what I’m feeling, and “anxious” is still the word that arrives first.

But I don’t stop at the alarm anymore. I go look for what set it off.