My Anxiety Is Making Me Nervous

I remember watching Annie Hall for the first time when I was 12 years old. It instantly became my favorite movie even though I didn't understand half of what was going on. The drug jokes, sex jokes, and repeated references to some guy name Freud consistently went over my adolescent head—but the the hypochondria, the self-deprecation, and the constant worrying captivated me.

I was a California preteen in the early 2000s who finally found someone she could identify with: a balding man in his 40s living in 1970s New York. He called it being "neurotic," which essentially means a functioning crazy person. The movie made all these character flaws seem charming; desirable, even. For a long time, I prided myself on my so-called neurosis. I told myself at an early age that it was OK for me to carry around the constant worry and never-ending feelings of fear. It's what makes me funny, like Woody Allen. To an extent, this is true, which is probably why I've ignored the fact that what I really have is severe anxiety.

My earliest memory of catastrophic thinking happened when I was around nine years old. I tried to fall asleep, but my mind would wander. I'd often start talking to God in my head. I would beg him to make me skinny, but I'd also ask, Can you hear my thoughts, God? From there, my next thought would be, Fuck you God, I hate you. Then I'd freak out and apologize to God. I'm sorry God, I'm so sorry. I don't know why I said that. Then it would happen again. Fuck you God, you suck. I kept sabotaging my own apologies. In the same thought that I'd beg for forgiveness, I'd keep cussing him out. God, please. You know I don't mean that. I don't know why I keep saying this. Fuck you. Fuck you, God. I hate you. It was a vicious cycle that could only be stopped by me opening my eyes and turning on the TV.

Even though I no longer believe in God—or at least no longer care that he can hear me cuss him out—I still can't be alone with my thoughts for too long. No matter how pleasant they start out, my brain finds a way to make even my happiest fantasies turn into something like, What if I babysit someone's kid and accidentally kill them? Then an image of a toddler I'm looking after appears in my head. She's grabbing a knife in the kitchen while I'm distracted by something else. I see her stab herself and die. It's all my fault. The thought of this makes my heart race, and my body gets tense. I feel an immense wave of guilt.

Of course I tell myself this is stupid, and that it's pointless to think about. Why the hell am I making myself worried about being responsible for a fictional toddler's death? I try to think of something else, but everything goes back to that goddamn kid stabbing herself with a big kitchen knife. That's when I open my eyes and turn on Netflix. Thanks to this child, I watched every episode of Cheers in one week. Thanks to convincing myself I have an undiagnosed brain tumor and/or am going to be murdered by a vicious stalker, I've seen every episode of Frasier. The list goes on. I've even watched every episode of How I Met Your Mother—that's how desperate I am to not be alone with my own mind.

Sure, having trouble sleeping at night and watching classic American sitcoms as a result of it doesn't seem so bad. However, there have been two particularly extreme incidents in my life that made me feel like this "neurotic" thing might not be so cute anymore.

It was my senior year of college. I decided to drive home at 3 AM from a friend's house. I had had a few drinks, but was desperate to sleep on my own bed. It was my first (and only) time ever driving after having consumed alcohol. I wasn't drunk, but knew that if I got pulled over I would get a DUI. It was late at night in my small college town, and the roads were completely empty. I told myself I was fine to drive the two miles to home, but as I started driving, that confidence went away. What if I'm really drunk, and don't realize it? I stopped at a 7-Eleven to get a bottle of water and a taquito. Then I pulled out of the 7-Eleven parking lot and got home safely.

The next morning, I replayed the drive home in my head—but as I did so, I convinced myself that when I backed out of that parking lot, I must have hit someone with my car and not realized it. I grew so consumed with the fear of this being true to the point where I had to call the 7-Eleven and speak with an employee. Someone picked up, and I asked, "Did anything at your store happen last night? At around three in the morning? Like a car accident or something?" He paused to think, mumbled a bit, and ultimately said no. I was relieved, but also terrified. This was the first time a catastrophic thought of mine had entered the physical world. I knew the whole time that I was being paranoid. I knew that I didn't hit anyone with my car in the parking lot, but this time I needed the confirmation from a source that wasn't me: a confused 7-Eleven employee.

For the rest of that year—almost every time I drove—a brief image of a dead body stud to the back wheels of my car would enter my mind. For a split second, it would feel like I might actually be dragging a corpse behind me. As idiotic as this is, it made me realize that I have a pretty messed up way of dealing with guilt, the emotion that figures in my destructive thoughts the most. Any time I do something I regret, which happens more often than not, my anxiety doesn't let me forget it.

This brings me to incident number two. In my early 20s, I was at a hardcore punk show, and in my drunken state of mind I had sex with a guy I had just met. The condom broke. The next day, I convinced myself I had gotten AIDS. Not a lesser STD like gonorrhea, chlamydia, or even pregnancy. Full-on AIDS. I knew the chances of this were very low, but the thought kept eating away at me. Whenever I had time to myself, away from friends or other distractions, it returned. I imagined getting the diagnosis and having to tell my parents. I kept seeing the same image of my mother bursting into tears, followed by an image of God saying, "Fuck you, Alison!"

I was so terrified, I refused to actually get tested for several weeks. Instead, I texted the guy from that night: "Hey, you're clean right? Like, no STDs?" As I typed the words, I knew what I was doing was foolish. He responded a few hours later, having no idea who I was. He hadn't even saved my number. This intensified my guilt. I told him it was me, that chick you fucked. He finally said that of course he was clean. I didn't believe him. Rather than go get tested, I texted him a second time the following week, knowing full well I was just making myself look worse. He said, yet again, that he was clean. He also asked that I stop contacting him. Wait, so you don't want to hang out again? I thought you liked quirky girls! I finally just got tested, and was indeed STD-free. I knew I would be, but what I was really searching for was punishment. I felt like I needed to suffer some consequence for letting a man who didn't even bother to save my number in his phone inside me.

Those two incidents are the only times my anxiety got out of hand, but I've always been scared to tell anyone about them. I knew that they weren't examples of me being a funny character in a Woody Allen film. (Although I will admit that I do find them kind of funny in a really dark, humiliating way.) Fortunately, getting older seems to have calmed me down a little bit. Meaning, the catastrophic thinking, worry, and fear is not as intense as it was then. However, they are all still present. I still frequently envision my death, and have trouble saying certain words like "cancer" or "schizophrenia" out loud. When people I don't remember meeting say hi to me, I assume I have some sort of early form of Alzheimers, or got roofied the night I met them and didn't even notice.

Then there's the ever-present anxiety around my career and fear of failure. I genuinely feel panic thinking that I can easily lose, or have already lost, my ability to write and create jokes. When I perform a new bit that bombs, I think about things from my past and tell myself that I must have peaked at 17, or taking shrooms twice in one month when I was 22 must have rewired my brain to make me less funny. I've convinced myself that going on a certain medication, or really just changing anything about myself, will make me a completely different person, a talentless hack. I fear that getting into a serious relationship will make me less motivated to succeed. I fear that having more money will make me lose my work ethic. Really, I fear feeling content, which is why I've ignored my anxiety up until now.

I've scheduled my first appointment with a therapist and am hoping he'll have more constructive ways to deal with this than I do. Maybe I'll even get some of that so-called "satisfaction" all you well-adjusted people seem to rave about.

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