Anxiety Meditation
2025-11-16
I'll put it out there: I have a hard time trusting The Process. Controversial, I know. But anyway, there's this deep-seated thing inside of me that makes me doubt all the time. I think that it's a fundamental thing that exists in all people. I could spend time thinking about that and systematizing and theorizing about it, but I think that it would be a more efficient thing if I just posited it as is and move onto explaining how it affects me (and possibly others) on the day-to-day.
I think I remember reading from Kierkegaard about the nature of anxiety and how it's basically the fear of an uncertain future. The difference between anxiety and fear though is in tangibility; fear comes from the tangible, while anxiety comes from the intangible. The future is something that is always going to be intangible due to the fact that it doesn't exist. It's a strange thing, fearing something that doesn't exist. I think that it stems from the same place as all creation: thought turned to reality.
See, when we think and have thoughts, those thoughts are the fuel behind the material things that we create or encounter. All inventions and art were originally just thoughts that existed in someone's head, but then became reality through putting that thought into action. Anxiety, I think, stems from this individual power. In the same way that we can create wonders with our thoughts, the same is true with the evil and abhorrent. So anxiety, then, really isn't an intangible fear of something that doesn't exist, but is the fear of our own potential for creating something evil and abhorrent with our thoughts.
It's a sort of narcissistic thing though, thinking that I am that powerful. It's definitely something that doesn't get met with praise or admiration. If anything, it would make social parity feel threatened, and in turn manifest in soft rebukes from others. "Oh wow, I never thought of it like that. That's so cool, man haha." I think that's another source of anxiety: a fear of the imposition of Will upon others.
I feel weird admitting this in public, but I do have a tendency towards sadism and masochism. Obviously I don't mean that in the stereotypical way where it's like a kink or some kind of gay shit like that. No, there's a deeper part of me that derives actual pleasure from inflicting pain. It's something that I repress so much and so often that I rarely ever confront it, but now's as good a time as ever, I suppose.
You see, this pleasure from inflicting pain is something that I fear a great deal. It's especially true because I have so much potential to do so. I'm a big and strong guy and I'm smart, which makes for a rather dangerous combination in terms of self-weaponization. In a narcissistic but painfully self-aware kind of way, I often compare myself to Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron, "a genius and an athlete." But instead of getting pulled down by society, I pull myself down. So with that, my sadistic tendencies are often turned inward and morphed into masochism as a means to protect those around me from, well, me.
Throughout my life, though, I have mythologized this self-sacrifice and used it as a means of nobility. "I can hurt you, but I'll keep my sword sheathed." Except instead of just keeping the sword sheathed, I take that desire to hurt and morph into a series of self-destructive tendencies that in effect make it difficult for me to maintain my side of relationships at times. The self-destruction typically manifests as isolation and in that isolation, I hurt myself.
But now I'm at a point in my life where I want to take this isolation and this self-destructive energy and convert it into something good. This is why I picked up writing in this way, I think. When I'm alone and I can write, it takes the bitter self-examination and turns the isolation into something actionable, something that can help others. It's easy for me to consider myself as a completely original person and that no one can really understand these plights and that this act of writing them out is nothing more than a selfish outlet of intellectual masturbation.
Thankfully, though, I am not original. In that lack of originality, I foster connection.