What Anxiety Has Taught Me

Three years ago, I felt pressure in my chest, and I truly thought I was dying.

I remember everything about that day: the hour, the light, what I was wearing, where I was standing, who I called first, and what I did in the hours that followed. It became clear, very quickly, that what I was experiencing was a panic attack, an anxiety eruption, sudden, terrifying, disorienting.

Since that moment, anxiety has entered my life as something that stays. Not always loudly, not always visibly, but always somewhere nearby. It has navigated me, interrupted me, clarified things for me, reminded me. Mostly, it has become something I had to learn how to live beside.

Living with anxiety is a marathon, a marathon with no finish line. Each day, you don’t know if you will meet a steep climb, a sudden drop, a familiar loop, or a new sensation in your body. And slowly, along the way, I have learned things.

I have finally learned how to pause. How to listen. How to stay with what is happening inside me. I have learned to work with muscles, with tension, with release. I have learned to write poems and stories. I have learned to respect the body, to care for it, to listen, to cooperate with it rather than fight it.

When anxiety arrives, I usually feel it first in my breathing, in my chest, in my lower belly. I have learned to pause and ask: Where does it hurt right now? Where is it tight? What is being held? What kind of care is needed? I breathe deeply. I breathe slowly. I return, again and again, to the simplest practice of coming back into my body.

And then, once the body softens even slightly, I move to the next question. Where did this come from? What did it awaken? What did it remind me of? What old wound has been touched, what fear has been stirred?

Anxiety is rarely only about the present moment. It is often an echo. A messenger. A reminder of something tender inside us that still needs attention. And I ask myself gently: what can I do right now to stop the pain from growing? What kind of care, what kind of truth, what kind of grounding is being asked of me?

Sometimes the bravest thing is to cancel everything, to gather inward, and to say: right now, I need to take care of me.

It is not easy to speak about anxiety, even though so many of us carry it. It is difficult because anxiety is often mistaken for weakness. But I believe the opposite is true. Those who dare to feel, those who dare to sense the world from the inside, those who dare to breathe, to love, to ache, they know anxiety intimately.

My anxiety has taught me how to be better with my clients and groups. It has taught me how to be a better mother. It has taught me love, fear, and attention. And it has taught me creation.

Because again and again, it brings me back to the studio. Back to lines, to memory, to the quiet language of making. Back to words on a page, to color, to the body as a map, to the deep places people can reach when they are held with care. Anxiety has taught me, above all, how to be human and to allow others to be human too.