I'm Anxious
2024.06.07.
For a while now, I’ve felt something stirring inside me, something I can’t quite identify. I remember when I started my event organizing life at the university student office... Whenever an important event was approaching, anxiety would hit me. I felt it in my body. The most common symptom was that I couldn’t breathe properly. I’d try to take a deep, full breath that would fill my lungs, but it just wouldn’t happen. It got stuck somewhere up high. I’d try to yawn or use some technique to take a bigger breath, but it wouldn’t work.
But there were worse things...
I remember once noticing that one of my legs was shorter than the other. I even limped for a day or two. I seriously freaked out, wondering what the heck was going on. I sat down and tried to figure out what the hell this was. How could one of my legs be shorter than the other? It couldn’t be; that’s impossible. It must be some kind of mental thing... Once I talked myself through it, I stopped limping.
Around 2017, I had a few weeks where my heart was all over the place. I could feel it beating irregularly, sometimes with a hard, strong thump. What the heck? What should I do? Google! I looked up what I could about arrhythmia. Stress! Okay, okay, but what am I stressed about? Ah, in a few weeks, I’ll be giving a presentation in Rome—in English. Great, except I don’t really speak English... But at least I figured it out. This one didn’t go away :) I couldn’t do much about it, so I just cut down on my daily coffee intake and tried to survive until the presentation was over. I managed. My heart has been fine since then.
But I can’t breathe!
But now, what the heck is going on? For the past 3-4 weeks, the old "I can’t breathe" feeling has been back with me. What should I do? What could be wrong with me? What can I do about it? A few years ago, I watched a video by Zoltán Cser, a Buddhist teacher. I don’t remember exactly what it was about, but it was something like this: we should try not to fight against these situations, in other words, against ourselves. We should try to get to know this side of ourselves. Invite the demon into our house and sit down for tea with it. Get to know it, and through this understanding, resolution will come.
I CAN’T BREATHE!
I get it, I’m trying. I’m not stressing about the fact that I don’t know what I’m stressing about to the point where I can’t breathe. I don’t want to solve it. It’s enough to get to know it. So, let’s get acquainted. How? Let’s bring out the old technique and dissect the situation. What’s bothering me? Let’s assume it’s something I’m anxious about that’s not just in my subconscious. Why? Because if the cause is in my subconscious, I can’t dissect it. Because I can only know it consciously. Even the word suggests that: I know.
So I know.
If I know, but it doesn’t come to mind immediately, then for some reason, my mind is trying to handle this thing in a way that it doesn’t seem too important, but it actually is. So much so that it’s taking my breath away. Pff. What’s on my mind:
What will happen to my sons? My sons are at that stage of growing up where they’re slowly detaching completely from the family background. Could I be anxious about that? Am I afraid I’ll lose control over them? Am I afraid that if they don’t live the way I’d like them to, then how will they live? Am I afraid that if they’re not successful, happy, recognized, or anything, then it’s my failure? Will I fail as a parent? Can I accept that they live differently than I do, that they find success in something else, whatever that may be? Hm. My mind says: of course! Absolutely! I trust them! Let them live as they wish! Am I sure?
What will happen to my career? It’s been two and a half years since I retired. Since then, I’ve been on a journey of self-discovery, helping others build companies, supporting company leaders, learning, doing all sorts of useful things. But is this a career? Do I have a goal? Can the goal be that I’m searching for my goal? Do I have a plan? Can it be a plan to walk around with an open mind, talk to people, learn to find my goal? Can you make money from this? Can you live off of it? If my investment income is enough, do I need to have work-related income? No. No? I don’t know. Do I need it, or do I just want it? Until I was 47, I needed it. From the age of 18, I supported myself. That’s almost 30 years, and it’s only been a little over 2 years since then. Mentally, I’ve adjusted, but have I accepted it deep down? My mom still always asks: son, do you have a job?
I’m anxious.
It could be existential anxiety. No matter how pointless, illogical, and even humorously unbelievable it seems to me. In my mind, everything is fine. Fine. And I’ll write it again to be sure: fine. When I think about what could be wrong, the answer is: nothing. But something is, because I absolutely can’t breathe. And if I scratch the surface enough, only these two topics come to mind. Could these be the causes, or one of them? Or is there something else lurking deep inside, choking me from within? I don’t know.
What should I do?
I talk about it. Sometimes with myself, sometimes with my partner, sometimes with my friends. As I talk about it, I feel a little better. It’s almost as if that something, that suppressed thought that’s choking me from within is desperately clinging to something to somehow come to the surface from deep down and, by taking shape in words, break free. So...
...I let it go,
let it run out of me...
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The article was translated from Hungarian to English by ChatGPT. Thank you, ChatGPT, for being here.
