Anxiety, Friendship, and the Pandemic Landscape
Where do we go from here?
Content warning: anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder.
This has been a strange summer. So good in oh-so-many ways, but also possibly one of the more challenging times I’ve faced, personally, in quite some time.
And I expect I’m not alone in this. I’ll often joke to my husband about the difficulties of keeping afloat amid a global pandemic and a rapidly worsening climate crisis, but sometimes I can’t help wonder if the grief and despair of it all hasn’t started decaying something beyond the surface of my day-to-day living.
About the middle of July, a month and a half or so ago, I experienced an unexpected resurgence of anxiety that more or less blindsided me. It happened during a visit from my mother-in-law, and while I certainly don’t think she was the sole cause of it, I suspect it was one of those straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back situations. Probably the anxiety had been building for quite some time, and having another body in my space after such a long span — one with a tendency to test my patience (telling me I “vacuum too often” or questioning why I don’t eat certain foods) — was the thing that pushed me over the edge.
I’ve more or less had anxiety my entire life. When I look back now at my adolescence, I…
