Ever feel the tremendous weight of fear lounging on your shoulders as time just passes by you, and you feel more and more afraid of what will happen when the time comes that you have to face a problem which you cannot face because you do not have the courage to do so? Yeah? Me too.

Anxiety can occur for many, many reasons, but this particular type of anxiety is a direct result of your own actions. Or rather the lack of action.

Regardless of what you do for a living, there will always be times when you are expected to meet a deadline regarding either studying or work. If you are, say, a student, you are expected to read the right amount of books, do further research, stay active in your field, communicate with other researchers/students, stay in touch with your professors, and reach a deadline for your essay. Seems like a reasonable set of requests, right? Yes, it is. For some people, deadlines are little kittens that they slowly walk towards and gently pet when they reach them.  After all, in theory, a deadline is nothing more than a date. Except when it is.

The people who do not stress out about their work, the way that they will accomplish it, and the positive and negative criticism that the work will receive are, in my opinion, in the minority of the world’s population. Many people find it hard to talk to others in person (especially in formal situations where they must also mind their behavior). As a way to deal with this problem, they try to prolong the deadline or meeting for as long as possible and live in perpetual fear of the time when that moment will happen, because it will happen, it must happen, it is by all means unavoidable, and they know that there is a great chance of their personality breaking into pieces, portraying them as a person that they are not, and ruining everything. If you’ve ever felt like this, then you and I are alike. Congratulations. Have a cookie, because if you have this feeling towards deadlines and obligations like I do, life will not be easy to deal with.

I have caused numerous very uncomfortable situations for myself simply because I was too afraid to do something. This includes both University situations where I felt terrible anxiety and fear about going to see a professor regarding my research, and also private situations where fear of confrontation meant that problems and disagreements with friends, which were initially small, eventually turned into monsters for me to fight. All of these problems could have been solved much more easily if I had just dealt with them from the very beginning. But I didn’t. Why? I don’t know. I don’t understand why I, and many other people, feel this sense of fear when expectations are placed on them, but I do – we do. Again, it could be for a number of reasons – fear of rejection and criticism, fear that you are not prepared to do the job properly, fear that others will do it better without trying as hard as you will, and even fear of writing down the first sentence. Whatever the reason, an obligation placed upon you is something that you cannot escape without dire consequences on your life and work. So for the benefit of not completely ruining our lives, we shall consider all deadlines and obligations to be ‘unavoidable’.

There are only two ways that you can deal with them:

1. If at any point you discover that the burden of your obligation can be placed on someone else, thus freeing you from the responsibility of doing it on your own, take a wild animal’s leap towards your target, pin them down, and shove the obligation inside their mouth until they are forced to bite down on it hard and chew and digest the obligation for you until it disappears out of sight!

2. Because the first method is unethical, morally wrong, damaging to your own psychology, encourages such behavior to reoccur, and is blatant physical abuse, you will have to do it the only other way possible – yourself.

Take a deep breath, and GO! Just. Go.

Taking that first step is by far the most difficult obstacle that you will ever have to cross. Having to make the phone call, to sit down and start writing or studying, to send that email or to leave the house can literally cause panic attacks in people. But it is the only option you have, and one you must learn to deal with as soon as possible, because the longer you put something off, the more difficult it will become to mend your mistakes later. Think of it as pulling of a band aid of emotions. The initial gut pain you feel when you first find yourself face to face with the source of your anxiety will be very stressful and may even make you nauseous. But as soon as you pass that first step, everything after it will start to unfold slowly, and things will fall into place. Things need to end.

Regardless of whether what follows is good or bad, your story needs an ending. If you are ever to return to a peaceful state of mind, you need a conclusion. Every chapter that exists in your life is a book of its own. Imagine reading 400 pages of a book only to reach the last page and realize that what appears to be the last page is in fact not the ending of the book, but is instead as much of the story as the author could handle before giving up.

The feeling of relief that comes after everything is over is more healing than any words could handle to describe.

But if you think that one successful problem solved will be a lesson learned for life on anxiety, then I’m afraid to say that things will not be as easy as that. If you do manage to immediately convert to someone who is no longer anxious and can handle every single one of life’s problems by learning from one mistake, then by all means – Congratulations! You are much more emotionally stable than the rest of us, and while we will forever admire your courage and ability to change the way you think in such a short span of time, we can do no more than watch you. Because for the rest of us, the journey will be  a much longer one. Anxiety  and fear take a very long time to heal, and sometimes they never do. It is much more likely that you will go through the same emotions again and again every time you are faced with a problem or an obligation, and every time you are, you will always have either Option 1 or Option 2 to choose from.

Life is, for all of us, not just you or me, a journey. Because we try so hard to separate ourselves from animals, we forget that all life is about pleasure and survival. And while we like to boast that we have invented many ways to please ourselves, we have forgotten how difficult it is to survive when there are so many of us. You must fight for what you wish to have in your possession and for what you believe in. There is no way around it. If you fall back, you will be left behind. People do not spend as much time thinking about others as you may think. They spend even less time trying to understand each other, and instead use every spare moment to think about themselves and those that are nearest to them. It is very unlikely, though not impossible, for two people who have no immediate benefits from being in each others company to put a lot of effort into making each others lives better. Not just for that one moment when their lives cross paths, but for a much longer period of time in the future as well.

So are people essentially evil because they do not try harder to understand others and their anxieties? No. Because that is not their job. Their life is about them and them alone. It is theirs. So if you do meet someone who is willing to put more effort into helping you with anxiety other than saying “Oh get a grip and stop whining”, keep them as a friend, for there is a very small number of such people in the world. But until you have the pleasure of meeting such a person, you will have to deal with anxiety on your own. You will have to learn that every time you are faced with an uncomfortable situation you will need to take a deep breath and act on it. But you must also, at all times and forever, be aware of the fact that you are not alone.

There are many of us, too many, that are trying to deal with anxiety every day. Things will get better in time, and life will hopefully no longer feel like such a struggle. Every time you crash into a brick wall, get up, pull up a chair, and climb over the wall. If you do not get the wall out of your sight, you will never see the brighter future on the other side. That and the fact that the rest of us dysfunctional people will be waiting for you with tea and cookies. At least do it for the cookies!

~ Amicia Rai 2013