Feel your feels
Every once in a while I will go through phases with intense anxiety. Like the kind where it’s hard to eat and all you want is for someone to take the feeling away. It’s usually accompanied by something like a pandemic that throws me off from my sense of normalcy. Now, while I’m learning in my statistics class, correlation is not causation, I think it’s safe to say that the two are strongly related. I’m not going to lie, the pandemic gets me pretty anxious. There is so much unknown, and everyone disagrees about what the best thing to do is. It just seems like there is no solution and this makes me very nervous.
There will be things in life that push us out of our path of normalcy but it doesn’t have to take away from our peace. Something that I am very slowly learning is that we have control over our emotions. When the feeling of anxiety or fear comes along, we can ask ourselves, “is this something I can do anything about right now?” If the answer is yes, then do the thing that you can do; if no, redirect that anxiety or fear and do something courageous instead. And for me, this doesn’t work every time. Many times the emotion of anxiety seems too strong to conquer on my own. If I’m being smart, I’ll turn to prayer.
For a very long time, when I would experience heavy anxiety I would just pray and pray for God to take it away. Honestly, this is true for any pain or suffering. The only thing I wanted was for it to go away. I can’t count the number of times I have prayed for God to take away the pandemic or just one of the effects it’s had on everyday life (like online schooling). This path was often disappointing because usually the pain and suffering wouldn’t go away, at least not quickly. Like, c’mon we’ve been in this thing for about a year now, and it doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon. This led me to question if God really wanted what’s best for me. If he really cared, why would all these bad things be happening and why am I feeling this way? Deep down, I knew it in my mind that He has a greater plan than I could ever imagine or fully understand, but sometimes the distance between the mind and heart is very far.
Recently, when I have these feelings of anxiety I’ve thought “what if I don’t wish away these feelings and what if I just simply ask for the strength to endure them?” So, I did a little experiment and tried doing that, and let me say, so far, every time I’ve felt so much more at peace than I ever did wishing away the emotion. When I ask for the strength to battle anxiety rather than to rid it completely, I feel both empowered and peaceful. There is power and purpose in our emotions and experiences and many times they just need to be endured. Many times there is a reason for our pain and we are meant to feel it. Pain is often how we grow, so it is important that we experience it sometimes. But that doesn’t mean that we have experience it alone, we can ask for help in carrying it.
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