I was driving home from work the other day and I realized that as I flipped from station to station I was feeding my already bad/anxious mood like adding gas to a flame. I noticed that I stopped on every sad or intense song I could find, and let the lyrics wash over me, triggering an onslaught of negative emotions that became more and more difficult to shake. Hours later the music continued to play in my head, except now I heard it as a thunder clap in the distance. I knew a bad moon was arising, I saw trouble on the way. Anxiety is like a thunderstorm, but I mean a real fuckin thunder storm, not a New England one.... one from Wichita. It comes out of nowhere and builds up to terrific violence without warning. Immediately you're painfully aware that you're not in Kansas anymore, and though you yearn for the peace and serenity of the plains you're trapped in a swirling vortex of entropy. Your heart rate accelerates from 0-ludicrous speed in the blink of an eye; your mind races along at 3.0x10^8 meters/second, yet ironically comes to a complete stop, a paradox that only complicates things further until the mind fuck is complete. You feel completely and utterly alone and it hurts just to breathe. So why would I do this to myself?
I struggled to comprehend why I had done this to myself until I realized that I was feeding the negative mood bc even as painful as it was/is, it is familiar. And familiar, even if it is painful, is comfortable. I think we can all be guilty of things like this (maybe not to the extreme that I am) but it must have some benefit to us/me or we would not do it - perhaps it is the benefit of familiarity and the safe feeling that it produces (as odd as that sounds)-as a friend pointed out to me, we know what we are getting when we dwell on it; we are familiar with it - we are not when we take an 'unknown path of action' . We take an odd comfort of the known-known, even if it is sadness, anxiety or stress; we’d rather dance with the devil we know than the one we don’t. It’s that fear of unknown-unknowns that seem to challenge us most.
It reminded of the line Red says to Andy in The Shawshank Redemption “These walls are kind of funny. First you hate em, then you get used to em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them.”. Metaphorically speaking we all build up the walls Red is referring to. Perhaps the single biggest challenge we all face in life is breaking down those walls, and choosing to face the unknown. That 6 inch prison b/w your ears can be every bit as, if not more debilitating than any real prison could ever be. It can, and will cripple you if you let it...and even knowing that, here I am, waiting for another sleepless night....dancing with the devil I know, in the pale moonlight.
