Battling with Nothing

I think that the toughest battles in life are the ones where your opponent is seemingly nothing. I have struggled with severe anxiety for pretty much all of my life, and from that come a lot of other challenges. Disordered eating, social anxiety, derealization in my lowest points, constant stress and worry.

The toughest part about each of those, at least for me, is the fact that because I am constantly overthinking, I can always think them into oblivion.

It really is not that hard to convince yourself that the anxiety you have been diagnosed with simply isn’t real. Telling yourself that no one else would be upset about it is a pretty good place to start in my experience.

Yesterday for example, I cried over Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup.

I was about to have some soup for dinner when I started second guessing if that was actually what I wanted. It felt like there was something else that sounded better, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. As early evening turned into just regular evening and then it turned to the late evening, I got really stressed about what I was going to have for dinner.

At this point I was getting pretty hungry but also convincing myself it was okay because first I needed to figure out what I was going to eat. Finally, it was 10 PM and I was still so lost over what I wanted but I was absolutely stuck.

Ultimately, I cracked open the can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup and ate it, but not without a fair amount of frustrated and sad and confused tears. No one told me I had to eat the soup, no one told me I couldn’t eat the soup. But the idea of it put me into such a fit of anxiety that I sat and contemplated it while doing homework for hours. Stressing, allowing it to live there, rent free.

All the while convincing myself that it simply was not real anxiety because no one else would ever be upset about such a thing so it is really just me being me.

These little occurrences are something I theoretically could fill notebooks with, but sometimes they are honestly hard for me to point out. Being honest about the thinks that cause mw anxiety, big or small, just being able to name it is something that I am still working on.

At the end of the day, although the Campbell’s chicken noodle did nothing wrong, I probably won’t have any for a while.