Angst In Your Pants?

Anxiety: part fear, part dread, all yuck. Worst of all, like self-pity, anxiety requires neither logic nor reason to flourish in abundance.

Sure, there are a million logical reasons to use “dread” as a verb. Read a newspaper (or whatever it is you do), answer the phone, open your email. Fear is Darwinian. Without hazards there would be no evolution, survival would not require adaptation. “That which doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger,” etc.

But just as paper covers rock, and scissors cut paper, both chance and luck beat logic. In the middle of the gloriously crappy action-horror novel I’m reading was this chunk of gold: Nihil desperandum. “Never fear.” This is stupid.

Thinking about why it’s stupid was enlightening. Fear is good. It tells us to get out of the way of an erratic driver. It warns us to check caller I.D. and not to put stinky milk back in the fridge. Anxiety is the baby sibling of fear. It’s a whining and bratty sibling, nonetheless anxiety can be ultimately useful as motivation.

Trust your instincts. If you’re anxious, there’s a reason for it. Trace it, track it. Figure out if there’s something you can do to prevent whatever you’re afraid of, then do it.

But, if you’re anxious because of insecurity, that’s a different animal entirely. In that case, take a deep breath and know that even if you have doubts, I believe in you. Man up. One foot in front of the other, lift your chin and keep going. Trust me. You will get through this.