Anxiety? Or crappy situation.

I’ve been having the same conversation with several wonderful people in my life lately. And, if I’m honest, I’ve been having the same conversation with myself too. It can basically be summed up like this: 

Just because you have anxiety, it doesn’t mean things aren’t actually scary.
Just because you have anxiety, it doesn’t mean life isn’t really hard sometimes.
Just because you have anxiety, it doesn’t mean people aren’t behaving in an absolutely sh*tty way towards you.

When you live with anxiety, you get used to pushing down your feelings. Your mind and body spend a lot of time making you feel like you are in serious danger, but logically you know you’re not, so you have to push those feelings away in order to be able to function. Anxiety also spends a lot of time making tasks feel ten times harder than they should, magnifying criticisms, and twisting words and situations until you feel worthless and like everyone hates you. So we spend a lot of time not trusting our own perceptions – repeatedly telling ourselves that we are not trustworthy.

The thing is though, sometimes we are right.

At the end of last year, I was lucky enough to be able to travel overseas to England and Germany. Considering I live literally on the other side of the world, I knew that some of this was going to be a real challenge for my health – both physical and mental. Even more so because in the weeks before I left, I had been under some extreme stress and as a result had a really serious sleep walking incident injuring my head and neck.

Fortunately, my physical health held up surprisingly well while I was overseas. There were a couple of points where I really, really needed the wheelchair assistance at the airports, as I couldn’t hold my own weight after sitting for 12 hour flights, and one day in London where I had pretty bad vertigo and nausea. But otherwise I kept it together physically, and my anxiety was staying in check too. 

Until I got to Germany.

My arrival in Germany was not at all straight forward. My aunt was kind enough to drive me the two hours from where I’d been visiting her in Bristol, back up to London, then I needed to catch two flights and two trains to reach the city where my friend lives. I was nervous about the journey, given that I have the direction sense of a carrot and quite often get lost in my own city, let alone halfway across the world where my grasp on the language is pretty limited. But I psyched myself up, researched and wrote down the train times, and started the journey.

And then the flight was delayed.

And then the second plane was late.

And then by the time I arrived, the train I was supposed to catch was no longer running, and the only other option was a much longer journey.

And then I realised that there were only two people around, neither of whom spoke any English, and I was completely blanking on any German other than “Entschuldigung, sprechen Sie English?” (Excuse me, do you speak English?) and “Kannen Sie mir hilfen bitte?” (can you help me please?) which does not help when the answer is invariably “nein” and you do not have the language skills to understand the help they are trying to give you anyway.

And then, after managing to communicate that I needed to get a train to Jena (ein Zug nach Jena), the information I was given did not match up with the information displayed on the train platform.

And the ticket machine did not have an English option that I could find, and it timed out three times as I tried to figure out how to make it work. Nor would it accept my money or my card, and the fines for getting on the train without a ticket are high.

And when I got hold of my friend to ask for help, she couldn’t translate the information either.

And then my phone died.

And then there was no one around, let alone anyone I spoke the same language as.

And then I was completely alone on a train platform 
in Germany,
in the middle of the night, 
in the snow, 
with no idea whether I was even in the right place.

So naturally, at this point I was panicking. By now it was after midnight, I was jetlagged, I’d been traveling for about 14 hours, and I was fricken exhausted. My legs were spasming, threatening to give out, but I knew if I fell I probably wouldn’t be able to get up again. Given the snow, being stuck on the ground overnight would likely mean hypothermia… and possibly losing some toes.

To cut a long story short, I saw there was only one train left on the board, so finally managed to persuade the ticket machine to take my money and got on it. At the next stop, I discovered the information I’d been given about the second train was completely wrong, but I did at least find some people who spoke English. They didn’t know where I needed to go, but they could at least point me in a likely direction. I then spent far too long standing in an elevator which said “doors are opening… doors are closing… doors are opening… doors are closing…” repeatedly but wouldn’t go anywhere or let me get out, before finally dragging myself and my suitcase up a couple of staircases while a group of men laughed at me from the top. I found the right train, got on it, and my friend met me at the other end.

Okay, so aside from the fact that a lot of this is now funny in its ridiculousness with some distance, why I am telling you all this, and what does it have to do with anxiety? 

I look at this story now, and I am incredibly proud of myself for keeping it together and figuring out what to do to get myself safely across Germany. At the time though, I was furious at myself for panicking. I was convinced I was making a big deal out of nothing, and that anyone else – anyone who didn’t have health problems or anxiety – would have been absolutely fine. Heck, I was even blaming myself for the whole situation – surely I was somehow to blame for the planes arriving late, the ticket machine being faulty and for the train timetables at the airport being out of date. It was clearly All. My. Fault.

Except it wasn’t.

None of this was in my control, and in fact, I handled it a lot better than most people would have. Right from the first delayed flight, I was coming up with back up plans for what I would do if I couldn’t catch the flights and trains I’d planned to, and when those back up plans got thwarted, I kept coming up with new solutions until I found something that worked.

It really wasn’t until I told the story to other people, and they responded with a horrified look, or said they would have sat down and cried if it had been them, that I realised this was actually a really stressful situation, not just an overreaction from me. This is pretty much the conversation I keep having with my friends. I find myself saying to them:

Yes, you have anxiety, but no, you are not overreacting, your partner/boss/flatmate/family member/friend is actually being unreasonable. No, you are not weak and useless, life has just thrown you so many curve balls you’ve forgotten what straight looks like, and actually you are stronger than everyone else to have dealt with all of them. No, you are not stupid, your work/study/technological item is just really, really hard to get your head around sometimes.

You see the thing people sometimes forget is that it’s entirely possible to both have anxiety and be upset because of a genuinely yuck situation – the two do not negate each other. 

Each friend who has come to me, I’ve reminded them of this, and they’ve done the same for me when I’ve started to doubt. Of course, there are going to be times where it is my anxiety or an overreaction, but I honestly think deep down I do know the difference, I’ve just stopped listening to myself. 

I don’t know what the solution is here. Finding the balance between pushing anxiety away, and listing to the real and valid fears is hard, and it’s something I (and my friends) will probably have to keep working on for a while. In the meantime, when my friends come to me with situations like this, I’ll remind them of one important thing:

You are worth trusting

And I’ll remind myself of the same thing.

Thanks for reading, 
Little Miss Autoimmune