The Anxious Writer: Chapter Four

Loss. We all have different associations with the word. We all stumbled onto it in some form or another.

We have seen someone lose the love of their lives, we have lost people to the inevitable truth of death and we have all felt its pain somehow.

The day I was introduced to my anxiety I realized that my loss defined me. Little did I know that this was only the beginning of my experience with loss.

Being diagnosed with anxiety was a consequence of so many issues and experiences in my childhood that ended with the death of my father. That was the main factor, but the loss of my father wasn’t the only one that got me here.

Throughout my battle with anxiety, I lost my self-confidence, self-love and appreciation. I lost the belief that I was worthy of any kind of attention. I misplaced every emotion that allowed me to become a mentally healthy human being.

I had expreienced so much loss that I was never consciously aware of to a point where my mind could not handle it and had to manifest it in some way. And that was was, of course, anxiety.

Today I am much more aware of my thoughts and emotions than I was on the day I was introduced to what it means to become anxious. I am more capable of making sense of everything I went through and how it either fed that anxiety or controlled it.

Every time,I would question myself a million times before going on a trip, meeting new people, taking up a challenge or trying a new experience, I lost.

Every time my stomach went on a roller coaster with the thought of meeting someone I don’t know, I lost. Every time I had to keep a pill in my purse to tell myself I had it under control, I lost.

With every battle anxiety wins, I still lost.

Loss and anxiety are best friends,  and for a long time I treated them both as my enemies, as forces beyond my control. All I did was victimize myself.

My father dies, I lose him, there is anxiety. When I see my house burn in flames, there is loss, but my anxiety does not let me deal with it. And with even a break up, anxiety just never takes a break.

What do I do? My decision was that if I could not put an end to loss and anxiety I could at least change my perception of them.

I have decided that it does not make sense to mark myself as a victim.

If loss is uncontrollable, what I must  do is accept that. In this process, I learned that victimizing myself does not make it better and what I choose to do is become a person who is accepting of the holes in my heart.

So every time I am anxious, I choose to fight rather than lose; to take a step out of that uncomfortable zone and to overlook the small losses towards a destination that entitles me to become stronger.

Mariam Mazhar
Senior Arabic Editor