Collin Willis

My mental health has not been terrific as of late. My relationship ended last month and that abrupt halt created the perfect concoction for an emotional tsunami, all of the water being suddenly sucked out from under you just to come crashing torrentially down on you moments later.

I think one of the hardest things for me in this process is that as hurtful as this breakup has been, it has been nowhere near as hurtful as the last one. While I have certainly been hurt by the other person in this one, a lot of my spiraling is due to my own making. I know that I have patterns that enable me to obsess further than is necessary and that they lead to further anxiety which leads to further obsession, which throws me headlong down a rabbit hole I don’t really want to be in. It is that anxiety that I’d like to talk about today.

I would like to say that this blog post was written in part before I received a lot of closure. While there are still feelings to sift through, it is not an accurate portrait of how I feel at this exact moment. I considered just not posting it for a while, but anxiety is something that I know a lot of people wrestle with and if I can share any insight on how to grapple with it then I think it’s worth exploring.

Anxiety Boy

I think I’ve always been a generally anxious person but it was never something that I felt was beyond my control until the relationship I talked about in Blinding Sparks. It was in the decline of that relationship that I had my first genuine anxiety attack. I don’t remember anything really preceding it, I was at work just doing my job when all of the sudden it felt like a black hole had opened up inside my stomach. It felt like every thought, feeling, and notion of anything present was being sucked through me and deposited beyond space and time. It was terrifying, enough so that I began therapy almost immediately afterwards.

Therapy was a big help. It enabled me to make sense of that relationship, its decline, and how I could better protect myself against those types of people in the future. The anxiety attacks like the black hole I had experience stopped, I got better, and I found a relationship where those controlling behaviors and periods of abuse were not a factor. For the most part, my feelings on the relationship that just ended are still positive. Until the end I felt loved and supported in a way that nobody has ever made me feel before. However, that love and support clearly didn’t last, and I struggle to pull the two apart.

Friends

Losing this relationship meant losing my best friend. My girlfriend was my social life. I don’t say this in a controlling or mean way like in relationships past, but in the sense that she was who I hung out with. When we split I realized almost immediately that I didn’t have anyone else in Orlando to regularly talk to or spend time with. I could think of maybe three other people who I’d even made an effort to see outside of work since we had started dating. A big wakeup call for me was at work one day when I was talking about what had happened and a friend of mine asked why I hadn’t told them about it yet. They said “You know we’re real friends, right? You can talk to me about that kind of stuff?” It floored me because it made me realize how oblivious I was being to the people around me.

Regression

I know that I often struggle with accepting that who I am is not who I was. When I look in the mirror I don’t see Collin aged 26. I often see Collin, dorky seventh grader who didn’t have many friends. Or I see Collin, who shut himself off from pretty much everyone because his grandfather had died. Or I see Collin aged 16, lovesick and afraid his crush will never like him back. Now I know that I am not those versions of me anymore. I know that I am stronger, wiser, and more comfortable in my own skin. But when those conditions are right and you can see the wave building in the distance, anxiety makes a really compelling case for just laying down and letting it wash over you. Those Collins are much easier to push down and the more I obsessed over my relationship and the answers I didn’t have, the more I regressed into the same patterns and beliefs I had at those stages and that I know better than to indulge.

Detox

I obsessed and I became anxious and I obsessed, and the spiral had broken me. My anxiety was spiking across the board. The first few weeks after we broke up, if I saw her post to her story while she left me on delivered, if a friend didn’t reply to me at the speed of light, if I saw anyone hanging out without me, if even the slightest misconception came across my brain then I would obsess and become anxious and so on. The spiral had me. I knew what caused it, I knew what was making it worse, it was time to do something. So, I did something I’ve never done before. I fully deleted my Twitter, and I removed the rest of the social media apps from my phone.

I generally try to take the month of January off of social media, but never have I gone as cold turkey as this. I knew it wasn’t going to last forever, I wasn’t sure if it would even last a whole week, but I knew it needed to start even if its finish came soon after. Within a few hours I was already having withdrawals but I was also becoming aware of the little ticks and anxiety spikes that were all of the sudden gone.

Beep Beep Buzz Buzz

The first thing I noticed was that my Apple Watch wasn’t annoying me all the time. I had started to become aware of this recently, but I was feeling an instant mood swing if I was at home doing something and my watch interrupted me. Namely, if I was in the middle of playing piano, and concentrating hard on something I’m far from mastering, the buzzing of my watch would irritate me beyond reason. With social media gone I wasn’t getting nearly as many notifications and there was a stillness that I hadn’t felt to that degree in some time. There wasn’t the constant demand of this tiny machine for my attention. Additionally, I was removed from the over connectedness that I have become accustomed to. I didn’t see anything that I might have been missing out on and therefore couldn’t fear it. I was no longer capable of finding the rabbit holes and throwing myself into them.

The time without those digital connections also forced me to get a little more comfortable with myself and how I felt in the situation. I became more aware of the things I can control and those that I can’t. How deeply I choose to obsess, how far down the rabbit hole I go, and how half-hazardly I feed the things that make me anxious are things in my control.

I do not think that you can take control lightly, both in exercising it and in letting it go. I cannot control how my relationship declined or how it ended. I can control how much I poke the wounds it left. I can control how much I expose myself to social media, how deeply I obsess over it, and how either prepared or unprepared I am for the Tsunami when it hits. This doesn’t mean that my defenses are impregnable or that my anxiety is somehow magically defeated, but that I am aware of where it has the advantage and the steps that I now know I can take in keeping myself protected against it.

Filling the Void

The paragraphs before this one were (mostly) written a couple weeks before publication. I wrote them when I was unsure if I would ever have any answers as to why my relationship ended. I’m writing this now haven gotten a lot of the closure I looked for. Yet even with that closure I find myself still anxious about things that aren’t even related to that relationship. I mentioned above about how she had been my social life and my constant communication and I am continuing to grapple with that void.

In learning to adapt to life without that constant contact I find myself backsliding on some days. I need the socialization and the texting to help remind myself that I am not alone and to distract myself from the habits that cause me obsess. Yet the moment someone doesn’t dedicate their every effort into talking to me, I find my mind wandering in a thousand different directions wondering why they hate me and how much they hate me at that. I started writing this blog post because I was sitting on my bed constantly refreshing Instagram wondering why my friends saw my Instagram story but didn’t text me. My brain keeps trying to force a correlation when there simply isn’t one, and my ego keeps trying to place the assumption that if I need extra communication right now that everyone else should be needing it or giving it too.

I do not feel like the priority that I used to be to someone and so my primal instinct is to insist that everyone give me that attention instead. And I couldn’t really understand it, so I decided to expurgate all those thoughts into WordPress and try and make sense of them here.

Dodge Bullets

Anxiety, to me, is a twisted Spider-Sense. I’m not talking about panic attacks or anxiety attacks, but the general daily anxiety that buzzes around my brain. Ideally, anxiety is a warning sign that something is off and we should be on alert. But our anxieties are formed from past experiences and they can often paint shadows on the wall into all sorts of shapes that are disingenuous from the things that actually cast them. Anxiety triggers our fight or flight and makes us think, okay time to dodge whatever shot is about to ring out.

What I am learning in this process and because of this time of heightened anxiety is that dodging bullets isn’t the point. We are never going to be fast enough or agile enough, or in my case thin around the stomach enough, to dodge those bullets when they come. So if we cannot dodge those bullets that anxiety warns us about, what can we do?

I’m reminded of a scene in the Matrix when Neo asks if Morpheus is telling him that he can dodge bullets. While Morpheus certainly believes he can, he instead tells him no. The point of the exercise was that when the time comes, Neo wouldn’t have to dodge those bullets. Later on in the movie Neo tries to dodge bullets and gets clipped twice. The fight or flight anxiety doesn’t save him then, nor does it save him when the gun is an inch away from his chest and Agent Smith kills him. What saves him is the realization that those bullets are only as effective as he allows them to be. The film climaxes not with Neo dodging bullets, but meeting them head on and stopping them because he trusts himself enough to know they can’t do any real harm.

Anxiety can be a tool, but if we let it go haywire and label every behavior from every person all the time as a danger, it will drive us insane. We cannot dodge everything our anxieties warn us about, but we can still respond to them. This process isn’t about me ever being capable of saving myself from harm, but learning what I can do when supposed harm comes my way. It is about knowing what is or isn’t in my control and how to appropriately adapt to those stimuli.

Reach Out

I’d like to close this blog with both a moment of gratitude. Being off of social media I was afraid of missing out on friendships and being disconnected. It took the absence of that digital connection for me to realize that I wasn’t really getting the real thing because I wasn’t prioritizing the real thing. So I did something that made me uncomfortable, I reached out and made new friends. The truth is that these people were all already my friends but I had been so caught up in my relationship and in life that I had neglected to maintain that outside of the digital world. So much so that when I had that coworker tell me “You know we’re real friends, you can talk to me about that stuff” it kind of shattered my perception of myself in those environments.

At the same time, I also had a lot of friends reach out and talk to me about what was going on. Even if the conversation only lasted a few minutes or a few messages, they all meant a lot to me. There is nothing to cure loneliness quite like the reminder that you are not alone. So thank you to everyone who personified that reminder. I know that I am not alone despite what anxiety and the Tsunami would believe me to be, and I want anyone reading this to know that you are not alone either.