A Conversation: On Anxiety

Irises, Painting by Vincent van Gogh

A few days back, some of our friends visited us for the New Year. I could sense, as if our place made a pretty, cute face on their arrival but when they left the face perhaps got a gloomy shadow all over. It could be because the weather took an unexpected detour. The stars didn’t show up, and the clouds lowered themselves quite snappily. And I had more boxes to tighten up.

I always feel that a human is made off with a pile of boxes. When I was around five, my drawing teacher taught me how to draw a girl. He took my pencil and made six or seven boxes; then he moved the pencil slowly and made a girl out of that. I still remember how I moved around my house to show everybody this magic trick. I showed that to every guest, every classmate, and every time to myself. My teacher taught me almost every posture with that box trick. The trick reminds me again and again that we have boxes in us even if it is not as literal as it is in a drawing copy but it has a connection with our emotional side. It’s as if we all have boxes of emotions and these boxes open up or close off themselves with the different conversations. That day, my tightly closed anxiety box opened quite obdurately.

A stony conversation somehow triggered my well-tamed anxiety. When the other person picks up the most uncalled vulnerable pointers, it shows up two sides: one, that person’s smart examples and two, the other person’s nervous finger-tangling actions. I was on the latter part. The conversation had thorns—thorns of uncertainty, fear, and loneliness. These three thorns never worked in favor of anyone, but I got an extra. The conversion came from someone who knew how I had tamed my gloomy emotions. That night brought those memories back. I made my pillows wet, and in my dream, I could feel the unjust untidiness in my emotions. Everything was dropping on my head forcefully.

I was recently reading a book, Unwinding Anxiety: Train Your Brain to Heal Your Mind. It’s a book of scientific discussion and author and psychiatrist Judson Brewer says, “Like a seed needing fertile soil, the old survival brain creates the conditions for anxiety to sprout in your thinking brain (chronic). This is where anxiety is born. Fear + uncertainty= anxiety.”   

Here, I put my questions; if we know how anxiety comes in, then why can’t we close the doors of those scary boxes?

Here we have another cue. If we get triggers from outside, at some point we may collapse. And the hardest fact is that we cannot control others behavior towards us. But we can bring changes. There’s a larger scope for how we can change our individual approach to meeting others.

We all know the dilemma of uncertainty and the dark sides. If we have basic knowledge about these acrimonious things, then we will have the sensitivity not to poke that hidden giant. That definitely needs some basic education on mental health issues and acknowledgement. This creates the basis for improvement.

There are ways to keep up the spirit of wellness when we are talking with someone else. Every conversation should come up with a sensitive and meaningful approach. It makes a significant difference even if we may or may not know about that person’s trigger points. These steps are quite easy as we can say when we are crossing a line. The easiest way could be to step back whenever you feel that you’re knowingly or unknowingly heading towards such pinching conversations. Even if we get into such conversations mistakenly, we can try to engage in a more meaningful and constructive conclusion and point out the positive takeaways. It’s the way to erase bad treats. It works for social media as well. This just needs the power of sensitivity.

One person should never come as an intruder to create chaos in another person’s emotional tidiness. We all have hidden boxes, and if one person starts respecting the other person’s emotional boxes, then this new epidemic of anxiety will see sturdy resistance from every end. I call this work Ina*.

This is a long-term commitment, but single steps with good words can make that look like a new walk in the flowery land of an artist.

(*In Sanskrit, Ina (इन).—a. means determined or anything that is powerful.)