The Most Existential Anxiety
If I’m being really honest, this whole farm endeavor is really triggering my anxiety. I’m not agoraphobic — I have no problem leaving the house and in fact I enjoy leaving the house. I am not anxious in large crowds or at a county fair. I do not get anxious riding on a Ferris wheel but will if I stand on a very tall roof. My anxiety is mostly the result of not knowing how to spend my time. I have existential anxiety. My anxiety says, “You have free time right now. You never have free time. You better use it wisely. Do something productive because death is imminent.” My anxiety wants me to be productive and produce things. My anxiety wants me to finish projects.
The problem is, with this new land of 5 acres and three buildings all with a growing forest around it, there is so much to do that I have very little idea where to start most days. My anxiety pulls me from one project to the next, never wanting me to fully sink in and go slowly enough to finish anything. My anxiety jerks me around from one task to the next, frantically wanting me to finish all of them but never finishing any one of them.
What helps my anxiety is writing about my anxiety — like I’m doing now. Or reading. Or randomly, shooting a basketball into a hoop.
Since being in graduate school for the last 2 1/2 years, I have had very little time to do anything but work, do homework and of course, look for homes and land to purchase. If I had any spare moment, it was precious and coveted. Now, being done with graduate school, I have a lot more time where I do not have to be in front of a computer, writing papers and participating in three-day long ZOOM classes. Ironically though, I enjoyed the grueling structure of graduate school because I did not have to worry about how to spend my time. I did not experience as much existential anxiety because for a while, I was inside of a structure that allowed me to forget that death is vastly approaching. For 2 1/2 years I was able to feel that I was participating in something productive because other people around me said so. I did not have to guess if I was spending my time in a “good” way. Professors and esteemed adults with PhD’s told me that what I was doing was worthwhile. Perfect — anxiety problem solved.
And the piece that is most confusing, is that I hate being told what to do. That’s psychological whiplash my friends. I will rebel all day long and drag my feet around doing homework assignments and having to sit through 12-hour ZOOM days but, I will not feel anxious. There is a structure and I am part of it. I know where I am supposed to be and what I am supposed to be doing. Even if what I think we are doing is boring and irrelevant to my life (which about 40% of graduate school was), I still prefer that over having to decide how to spend my time and if I am using that time to guide me in a direction I want to be going.
Before we had this farm and before graduate school, there were less choices as to how I could spend my time: I could go for a walk, I could hang out with a friend, I could create a new website page, I could write, I could sing and so on. But now, the choices are so incredibly vast that almost every day I feel paralyzed. I can learn to grout tile, I can paint a wall, I can learn to tear out drywall, I can learn about bees, I can sand my porch, I can stain my porch and on and on and on and on. It is like a looping maze of indecision. Making a choice now feels impossible.
When making a choice feels impossible, I freeze. I become decision-paralyzed. Walking is very helpful in these moments, sitting at my computer is not. Sometimes this freeze will happen while I am on Instagram and I am stuck in a loop watching voice impersonators for at least thirty minutes. On these days, which have been a lot lately, I end up taking care of my anxiety a lot more than I spend time doing anything else. These days become about tending and asking myself what I deeply need in each moment. I need to lay on the floor, now I need to read a page of this book, now I need some water and now I need to sit in the sun. My anxiety becomes very demanding and requires that I surrender and submit to her presence. I know there are a lot of people out there with anxiety that still get things done, that are very creative and that grow food and complete tasks. I just wonder if my anxiety is a form of self-sabotage or self-protection? Is the anxiety there to help me slow down or is it there to render me frozen in a way so that I cannot move forward with my life? Maybe both are true. Maybe both are real. But my soul seems to be speaking loudly these days and its language is anxiety. It seems to have a lot to say through the form of anxiousness and fear. I am listening which means I am writing. Writing is how I lean close to learn more about this anxiousness that seems to be moving to the front of my psyche now that we are here on the farm and things are coming to life all around us.
