Anxiety, my unwelcome visitor

It hit me at about 8:07 am, at the beginning of a long day of nearly 8 hours of presenting to educators, staff, and parents in a Wisconsin school district. Curiously, I was introducing my bright-eyed, surprisingly large early morning audience to the anxiety their kids are suffering these days, and the many forms it can take.

My plan was to dig into this long day, press through, grind it out. I do a lot of public speaking, and I can usually manage that really well with solid content, and enough balance between gravity and levity to keep my audience engaged and hopeful.

The room was warm. The crowd was large and attentive. I had about 2 straight hours of material to cover, important stuff for this group to know.

And that’s the moment when my familiar friend, anxiety, chose to rear his head. It had been a while since he visited, now only every couple of years or so. But when he shows up, he takes over with aplomb.

The sudden, immediate, massive, unquantifiable adrenaline rush.

The jarring, disorienting loss of breath.

The inability to think, an entire loss of the sentence I’m in the middle of speaking.

The sure feeling I’m moments from passing out.

The terror.

Abject fear.

Panic.

Good times.

It happens so quickly I have no time to make an adjustment to how I’m presenting to this group in the moment. Within a few (5, 10, 2?) horrifying, mortifying and silent seconds, I have to make a decision. My body was telling me, with absolute certainty, to flee. Find an excuse. Leave the room. Don’t look back.

But my anxiety and I have known each other for a while now. He tells me he’s going to show my weakness to the world. He’s going to humiliate me. He’s going to expose my deepest and darkest to a significant crowd.

And I make my call. I’m going to turn the tables on him. I’m going to take control of the moment, not give it up to him. He’s cruel. He’s an unreliable keeper of my self-worth. He’s not going to call me out, not anymore. He’s a liar after all. I’ve got the truth.

In that very brief moment of recognition, I had to determine whether I had the strength to muscle past the anxiety, whether I could work around it on my own, relatively undetected. And I quickly concluded that I could not. I could only go through it. And some instinct deep within me realized I would best make it through it not on my own, but with some help.

“Anxiety, huh? It can show up at the most inconvenient times. And here it is.”

As the room stills, I take a deep breath, a sip of water. I’m quickly finding my place, my bearings, my breath. I continue:

“This is that high idle I think a lot of our kids are stuck in. Like a panic attack in front of a crowd.”

With that recognition of the moment, the room softens. There’s a little chuckle in here as we conspire to find center again. Every face is looking directly at me, but they are kind. A few seem concerned.

And one guy close to the front, close to me, an unlikely character, maybe a coach, the guy I’d been making a Bears-Packers joke with moments before, gets up from his seat and approaches me.

“Hug from a Packers fan?”

We hug for a moment. He steps back.

In a whisper, “I get anxiety too. Hang in there, brother. We got you.”

I hope he knows how powerful, and empowering, a gesture that was. I believed him. And we were able to move on through the seminar with purpose and humor and empathy. Turns out, giving voice to the anxiety diffuses it entirely. We covered a lot of material together in those couple of hours, far more than we would have otherwise. We talked about the well-being of their young charges with great care and thoughtfulness. I sincerely believe that, without that anxiety, that moment of truth, of vulnerability, we could not have gotten there. I would have delivered a well-rehearsed, relevant, boilerplate talk. I’ve done that hundreds of times.

But this was a deeper discussion of the stress and anxiety felt by our kids, and I had my real-time panic that opened that door. The meeting felt meaningful, even special.

I’ve learned to treasure moments like this. I’ve suffered from anxiety my entire life, and for decades, it felt like the darkest shame, as if something was deeply wrong with me and my enfeebled psyche. Like I carried a singular weakness. In my teens, twenties and even thirties, my anxiety was a frequent visitor, usually daily. My relationship with him was avoidant, colored by forever-impending humiliation and disgrace. And the more I worked to keep him out of mind, the more he owned me.

I shared this story with my early morning audience:

Almost thirty years ago, I was regularly presenting to corporate groups on well-being in the workplace. I was working for someone else at the time, presenting their material slide-by-slide. It was good practice for being in front of a group. I had conducted a bunch of these presentations. They were quick and easy, and paid pretty well. And I was speaking to a group about the size of the one that morning decades later.

One fateful Thursday afternoon, I felt that same deep pang, the onset of panic. I began to sweat. My mouth suddenly too dry, my breath too shallow to speak coherently or establish a thought, I felt certain I had only moments before I would lose consciousness.

I found myself speaking, “Okay, I’d like you to study this slide right here, and I’ll be right back.”

And quickly, I made my actual escape. I walked past the crowd, past my contact at the firm, through the door in the back of the room, to the elevators, onto the street. Away.

I never looked back. I never called. I never reached out again to do one of those talks. As far as I know, there are about a hundred 70-year-old consultants patiently waiting in a downtown conference room for me to come back.

So, I haven’t always been so graceful in managing my anxiety.

Back then, my relationship with anxiety being so adversarial and shameful, I kept this mortifying episode to myself. Looking back, my silence and fear of his return provided my pal anxiety with all of his power. By allowing him to be in charge, to decide when to strike and how I would feel and react, I would carry his shame.

But I’ve come to believe that Brene Brown is right, that vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness. I really felt that in the room that first morning I described above. And strangely, though he is not actively with me very often anymore, I now see anxiety as my superpower.

My audience and I developed a rich relationship with one another that morning, a direct result of my moment of anxiety, that allowed us to cover more important stuff, in a far deeper, more urgent and meaningful way than we ever would have otherwise. It was a beautifully mutual moment of support. I showed up for them, with some information they absolutely needed to provide the care our kids require these days. And they showed up for me in a really meaningful and ongoing supportive way.

I won’t forget it.

I share all of this for a reason. I suspect a lot of us suffer our anxiety in silence. Or our depression. Or some other psychic disturbance that may make us feel not quite good enough, damaged, less than. And I can tell you with assurance that, the longer we hold that suffering secret, the more we suffer, more powerfully. And, no small thing, we suffer unnecessarily.

But if we provide it some space and air, if we give voice to it, even if it takes place in a very public forum, we can not only regain our power, but recognize that we’ve mischaracterized the situation incorrectly all along. What we believe to be our greatest weaknesses are often our most profound strengths.

Drawn from the shadows, our fears can connect us with others more deeply, empower us to feel and emote more fluidly and authentically, and provide us with a sense of agency over parts of our minds, our bodies, and our lives that we never thought we’d have any control over whatsoever.

I used to loathe my anxiety. I used to fear him in ways I cannot fully articulate. I used to try to sidestep and avoid him. Now, he can show up if he likes. I’m not going to allow him control over my mind, my time, my love for myself, my forward movement in my life. Instead, in those instances when he appears, I’ll leverage him. I’ve got the reigns now, and that makes all the difference.

I hope this tracks for you, and whatever secret malady you believe you carry that pulls you down diminishes in its power. I hope you can turn what you’ve believed to be your darkest weakness on its head, and recognize its power as your friend, not your enemy. I hope you can imagine reframing any shame you carry as something very different, a superpower you’re in charge of, one you can channel at your will.

I personally feel more than free. I feel grateful. I’m glad anxiety stopped by that morning.

Imagine that.