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<h1>Zk | 2012-11-25-3-on-anxiety</h1>
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<p>type: post
title: On Anxiety
date: 2012-11-25
slug: gender-anxiety</p>
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2020-06-24 07:10:07 +00:00
<p>I have a hard time with anxiety. Like&hellip;a real hard time. I know that the Internet in general and tumblr specifically seem to be focused around talking about a lot of the things that aren&rsquo;t right in one&rsquo;s life, but its pretty pertinent here, I think, where my whole goal is to talk about all those weird and awesome (and weirdly awesome) things about gender, sexuality, and so on.</p>
<p>Anxiety is, first of all, not quite the same as stress, though people may often say that a stressful situation is making them anxious. Anxiety is, in my mind, closer to doubt. If I&rsquo;m getting anxious over the fact that someone&rsquo;s passing me in the right lane on the freeway, it seems to boil down to the doubts &ldquo;am I driving fast enough?&rdquo; and &ldquo;did I do something wrong?&rdquo; and so on. In fact, the &ldquo;did I do something wrong?&rdquo; doubt is basically the clearest summation of anxiety that I can think of. Or, rather, it&rsquo;s the clearest negative summation that I can think of, with the clearest positive being &ldquo;I need to be in control of this situation,&rdquo; because that&rsquo;s how the positive situations (read: the situations that don&rsquo;t fall into the negative of anxiety) work. I feel responsible for a lot. A lot more than I should, because I&rsquo;ll feel responsible if a storm knocks out a friend&rsquo;s Internet and they&rsquo;re upset about it, or I&rsquo;ll feel responsible for my husband&rsquo;s reaction when the dog dies, even though the dog is three years old and perfectly healthy. That&rsquo;s anxiety, for me.</p>
<p>All of my own problems with gender, then, really tend to circle around responsibility and doubt. My doubts about my own gender feel like failures, like I had been irresponsible at being a man who felt like a man. I&rsquo;ve been thinking seriously about gender since elementary school at least, and its all bound up in guilt or doubt, which is why I&rsquo;ve been either reticent to admit or unwilling to accept that I was anything other than how I was shaped until this last (very dramatic) year.</p>
<p>Even now, even after starting to move forward through this roadblock I set for myself (however subconsciously), I still doubt every step forward. I am very, very anxious about gender and sexuality in myself, not only because of my past, but because that&rsquo;s just how I work, currently. I don&rsquo;t mean this as a poor-me sort of thing; I don&rsquo;t like anxiety, it&rsquo;s just sort of a fact of life for me and a ton of other people, and I&rsquo;m working through it. Rather, I think that if I&rsquo;m going to be talking about it in a public space, it would be helpful to know why.</p>
<p>The why of talking about it is tied up with the why of learning more about it. I have been reading and rereading articles, pages, and books about gender and sexuality for a while now. I&rsquo;ve been trying to trace my own experiences through the tangle of information, finding analogs and parallels, as well as things I disagree with or find abhorrent.</p>
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<p>After learning what I felt like was enough to do so, I started to write as a means of going further. I started very privately, on a locked twitter account that I eventually deleted (it was quite awful, oy), then slowly growing more and more public, talking about the whole concept with others - first in general terms, and eventually as it applied to me - until now, with this thing. It all falls into the realm of responsibility: if I did not know enough about the subject or myself, I had more to doubt when it was something that would come up in intersections with others; I was responsible for not screwing up when it came to talking about, writing about, or simply being this thing.</p>
2020-06-24 07:10:07 +00:00
<p>I suppose all this boils down to the fact that I&rsquo;m striving to keep ahead of some sort of perceived point of failure. I want, at some deep-down level, to be perceived as competent, successful, or even just healthy in my understanding of myself and where I fit in the world.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve been called on some pretty basic stuff, before, and it always gives the same twinge of failure, in greater or lesser amounts. Often, it means that I really, really should have dug deeper and understood what I was talking about, but it always, always triggers that heart-racing, tunnel-vision, oh-my-god-I&rsquo;m-going-to-die anxiety that alternately drives me forward and keeps me back.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s uncomfortable to be called out like that, and it occasionally throws me for a very panicky loop, but it almost always makes me a better person overall. So please, by all means, call me out, set me straight, and if everything bears out, I&rsquo;ll do my best to pull that into myself and move on.</p>
2020-04-25 04:55:06 +00:00
<p>Cheers :o)</p>
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