Anxiety
When I was dating my husband we used to take these walks all around San Francisco where we both lived at the time. He was born and raised there, and knew that city like the back of his hand. He knew the best places to grab a sandwich to-go on a Wednesday, which bars to go to at which times, touristy things worth seeing and those “for suckers”. You get the idea. One important thing he knew was which neighborhoods you didn’t want to be caught in after 5pm, and which neighborhoods you didn’t want to be caught in regardless of the hour of day. Often, after class (college) or on a day when I had no school and he wasn’t working a shift at the bar, we’d take these walks all over the city. I was curious about San Francisco you see, never having lived in a metropolitan area, and he was anxious to show me his “hometown”. San Francisco is only 7 miles by 7 miles, so it’s relatively easy to get across town and see many different neighborhoods. Given its size, the bad neighborhoods were not siloed off into some unexplored corner of the city, they were right there a block away from what was considered a good neighborhood. Literally, you would be walking around watching the stay at home moms (or honestly more often their nannies) pushing their Nuna and Bugaboo strollers, kids playing in a park, etc. in the “good neighborhood” and then BAM!
All of a sudden there was a group of homeless people in a huddle right in front of you shooting up together, sirens blaring past, and some guy sweeping past with an iphone clutched in his hand going as fast as you’ve ever seen someone run while his victim was unleashing curses at him from behind. Just like that. I always found it fascinating the way the environment in the city could change on a dime, like a flash flood sweeping you away.
My husband was less enthralled than I, having cultivated his cynical nature through years of living in San Francisco. The walks with him often regressed into stern lectures about “being aware”, “paying attention to my surroundings” “go here but don’t go there”.
Towards the end of school, but only a year or so into our dating, I would take these walks alone, wishing to be free of the lectures and wanting to lose myself in the bustle of the city. The walks had become a sort of therapy for me, quieting the voices in my brain, the noise of the city overpowering those I couldn’t ever seem to shut off. We used to joke about it, likening my walking addiction to that of a dog that needed to be taken around the block after a long day of restless pacing back and forth in front of the door...waiting...always waiting. My husband was still concerned that I would inadvertently end up in one of those “bad neighborhoods” and find myself in a “situation” (rightly so, I was pretty clueless), so he grabbed a map of the city and a sharpie, and drew a line around the areas I was allowed to walk. Going along with the dog analogy, we dubbed it my electric fence. I was not allowed to go past those lines without his presence.
I often think back to this time with fond memories. The simplicity of new and young love. Some would argue that we are still young in our 30s, and maybe so, but it’s been 15 years since we starting dating, and even the most seasoned couples will have to concede that ain’t new.
I started noticing that I had anxiety after I had my second kid. I was diagnosed with postpartum depression, which I’ve always thought was a funny word, because I didn’t feel depressed. However, those voices in my brain, the ones I couldn’t quiet from before? They were back and LOUD. Sometimes I felt like there was an ongoing scream inside my head, and I would run to the closet or on the staircase of our rental and clutch my arm as hard as I could until deep grooves would appear and the pain would override the screaming. For me, giving birth had unleashed a bomb inside my brain, blasting open all the rooms I’ve always kept tightly shut with a steel door, locks, chains and buried underground. Before I had been able to force the demons back into their rooms with something like a walk around an interesting and bustling city, but now nothing worked. Enter the anti-anxiety pill. Anti-anxiety pills are akin to my husband drawing borders on a map, I am once again in control of where I walk and what I see. I hope to lose my reliance on them in the near future, but for now, they do what I need them to do.
One of the reasons I started this Optifast program was as an effort to take control of the health of my body, which in turn would help me take control of my mind and all its demons. As we move deeper into the transition back to real food and away from the supplements, it occurs to me that I need an anti-anxiety pill for my eating. Or an electric fence. Something to mark a bright line around the foods and situations that put me at risk. Once I can draw that map, I will no longer be pacing back and forth in front of the door waiting (always waiting) but free to roam the city as I wish....within limits of course.