Pressure

I think about my anxious mind a lot.  It’s come up in the things I write frequently of late, which is probably an indicator of how much I’ve been thinking about it.  That’s one of the symptoms of an anxious mind—it thinks too much.  At least, some people might think that it thinks too much.  Most of the time I’m one of those people.  I think my mind thinks too much.  I think anxiety is the label we put on the idea of thinking too much.

When I decided to explore the idea of anxiety—because I can only face a challenge that I can put a definition to—I discovered a number of biblical synonyms for it.  I found words like affliction, trouble, and tribulation, and those words made some sense to me.  Then I found another synonym for anxiety, a word for anxiety that made the most sense for me.  The word is “pressure”, and it made sense to me because pressure is something I definitely understand.

He’s good.  He’s very good.  I can feel it in every grip and movement.  It’s a combination of strength and skill that I’m not sure I can match.  All it took was one hold—one simple grip on my gi pants—and he was creeping past my guard.  I should have never let him have that grip, but I failed to address it and now he’s advancing.

He’s deliberate.  Every movement has purpose.  He took hold of my leg and now he won’t let me have it back.  He’s pinned my knee to the mat with what feels like all of his body weight and there’s nothing I can do to stop him from passing my guard.  He’s in side-control in just a few moments, covering my body with his own.  And he’s good.  He’s very good.

I can feel his weight settle, and this guy knows how to settle his weight.  He naturally finds every crevasse and notch, chocking his hips in a way that contain my own.  We’re close to the same weight, I think, but right now he feels like he weighs as much as my truck.  He feels heavy.

All I can feel is pressure.

I can barely draw a breath.  My brain starts to panic—fight, flight, or freeze.  All I can think about is this pressure.  It’s the only thing in my mind.  It consumes my universe.  I can feel every small discomfort and every miniscule point of pain—I feel them all at the same time.  I can’t escape.  I’m doomed to this pressure.

We are pressured in every way but not crushed; we are perplexed but not in despair; we are persecuted but not abandoned; we are struck down but not destroyed.  (2 Corinthians 4:8-9) 

My anxiety is a pressure that I put on myself. I am my own worst enemy and my own best opponent. I also know that I do have an enemy in the spiritual realm who wishes me harm, but most of the time I really don't make him work for it. I can do plenty of harm to myself, especially in the confines of my own anxious mind. I find myself diagnosing and dissecting every interaction and conversation I have had, seeking for all the things I did wrong in every way that I could be every way I could have sabotaged and ruined whatever relationship or good thing I held for a fleeting moment.  I celebrate my insecurities as if they were worthy of a party.

These thoughts, whatever it is that is living in front of my brain, they rob me of my peace. Sometimes it's a thought that I haven't been able to shake for weeks. Sometimes it's something new. I rehash and reevaluate all the mistakes that I probably made. Sometimes, my brain starts to sabotage itself and even relive positive aspects of an interaction and transform them into negative memories and negative futures. I can't have memories of the future. They don't exist yet. But my anxious brain wants to create the mistakes I'm going to make soon and all the ways I’m going to suffer because of them.

I find myself screaming out loud at myself, frustrated that I can't let go of a concept, an idea, a mistake, a perceived threat to a relationship that I value but don't know how to put words to. I am putting unbearable pressure on myself, and I can't make myself stop. My emotional brain is running over the top of my logical brain and won’t allow it to speak. My thoughts spin circles around each other and criticize everything that I've done, should have done, didn't do, and would have done if only I could have done it.

The anxiety in my mind doesn't have any proclivities towards positivity. Everything it pursues is the most negative thing that it can find. It wants to destroy me.  It wants to digest every one of my interactions and relationship failures, telling me everything I did wrong and what I should have done differently and why everybody is looking at me in a way that makes it seem like I am a failure.  My anxiety tells me that I am a failure, and then it tells me over and over again until I want to believe it.

My busy mind will cast over time and space to occupy places that don’t exist—have never existed. It will look to the past and every mistake we've made, forcing it to the future to tell me why I'm not worthy of love, acceptance, worth or any of those things that live at the core of my identity. It will rewrite a future that hasn't happened and make me out to be a villain or a jester in the Grand Court of humanity. My anxiety—my very own brain—feels like it desperately wants me to fail at everything. It will take the most positive of interactions, the most beautiful of relationships, the looming and impending future that I haven't realized—it will take all of these things, corner them inside of my fragile psyche, and take a hammer to them. It will dash every moment of positivity, every ounce of redemption, and every iota of victory.  It will crush all of them.

This anxiety—this pressure—is a burden that lives inside of me.  I would love nothing more than to treat it like a drunk at a bar, challenging it to fight me in a place outside of my mind.  That’s a place where I know how to fight.  But my anxiety is sneaky and it won't leave the club. It's not going to walk out the doors where I can close them behind.  It's quite comfortable and it doesn't fall for tricks. It doesn't fall for tricks because it knows all about me because it is me—it is a concoction of my own reckoning, and my reckoning is weak-willed and powerless. My soul cries for relief.  It yearns for a way out.  It longs for peace at any cost.  And there is a peace—a cheap sort of peace—that I know I can find. 

I can choose to ignore, to avoid, to run away.

I can feel his pressure all the way in my face.  His shoulder pressure is tremendous.  There’s not a muscle in my body that isn’t stretched to maximum effort.  I can feel my upper lip start to twitch because that’s a weird spasm it does when I’m at maximum output.  His shoulder is driving into my chin, turning my face away.  His weight is perfectly centered over my sternum, activating every nerve ending.

All I want to do is get away.  I just want the pressure to stop.

I can feel the way out.  I can sense the direction that will ease the pressure.  All I have to do is turn my back and run.  There’s an avenue of escape and that avenue is to turn away.

But that’s just what he wants me to do.

I know he wants me to turn away because that’s what I would want me to do.  If I were the one in dominant position, I would create this sort of discomfort so that my opponent would try to turn away.

If I turn away, I’ll surrender my mobility and my strength.  That’s exactly what he would want me to do because that would improve his position.  It would only get worse if I turned away.

I can’t turn away.  It’s the worse thing I could do.

For God has not given us a spirit of fearfulness, but one of power, love, and sound judgment. (2 Timothy 1:7) 

My anxiety does, in fact, have an off switch.  I can turn it off if I simply choose to ignore and avoid all the concerns inspiring this anxiety inside of me.  I can relieve the pressure by never looking myself in the eye.

This wasn’t something I thought about until recently when a counselor (yeah, I have one of those) pointed out that I present as “anxious-avoidant”.  In short, my anxious mind will spin and contort until it’s had enough.  Then, once acknowledging that it’s been overwhelmed, it  resorts to ignoring challenges as if they weren’t there.  I step around them and shrug and pretend they can’t hurt me.

From time to time, the avoidant aspect of my anxiety is a superpower of sorts.  There are many times when it has greatly contributed to my survival and protected me from harm.  When I apply it to my professional realm, I refer to it as being “clinical”.  I am very good at being clinical.

I hold a memory of me as a young medic working in an emergency room.  It was a new assignment for me, so I hadn’t really dealt with anything intense.  Then word came that a major trauma was on its way via ambulance—and then word came that the victim of the trauma was a child.  I was assigned to the trauma bay that day, so I prepared just like I had been trained.  I met the paramedics at the ambulance bay so we could offload our victim.  I could see the looks on their faces—I could tell it was serious.  I watched as a panicking mother piled of the rig in tears.  I began to feel the seriousness of the matter.

I guess my anxious brain and I had a choice right about then. We could coddle the stress and obsess on all the bad things that dealing with hurt and sick children inspire, or we could shut off all of the anxiety and get to work. My brain chose the latter.  That might have been one of the first times I learned what it felt like when I become purely clinical. I was only a small cog in that machine there in that trauma bay, but I was on point.

Avoidance allowed me to create distance between that stressor and the work that needed to be done. I did that work well. That was one of the initial cases in my career that lead to what would later become an excellent reputation.  One of the things that made me good was the ability to dump surrounding stressors from my mind like bad data. 

When applied to my professional life I get to call it my avoidance clinical.  I still get to deal with some pretty horrible things, and I still have the ability to table all the emotion that might inspire anxiety and place it inside of some compartment of my mind.  I shove it to the side where it can’t harm me or my performance.

But, even if my avoidance causes me to be better at my job, that capability comes at a cost.  There is a tendency to leave those horrible things in that internal compartment where I never have to face them.  But that compartment is not an airtight box—it’s incredibly leaky.  The darkness that lives there will seep into the rest of me like a teabag in hot water.  If I don’t force myself to face those threats, those threats will soon find a way to destroy me.

This holds doubly true of every facet outside of my professional life.  I think that’s referred to as my personal life.  In my professional life I get to call my avoidance “clinical”.  Outside of my professional life—in my personal life—definitions like “aloof”, “distant”, and “indifferent” seem more fitting.  When the unaddressed anxiety grows too much for me to bear, I extract.  I step back and set apart from the problem—the relationship, the stressor, the condition I am struggling with.  I isolate myself and tell myself I don’t care and that the outcome doesn’t matter.

But, just like my professional threats—the ones I’ve stuffed into that dark compartment of my mind—my personal threats will find a way to destroy me if left unaddressed.  If I continue to avoid them—if I turn my back on them and run away—I will give them immediate access to the weakest parts of me.  And they will exploit those weaknesses in any way they can find.  They will eventually win.

Maybe the most effective way to deal with my mind lies somewhere between the anxiety and the avoidance.  Maybe it lies somewhere completely different.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding; think about Him in all your ways, and He will guide you on the right paths. (Proverbs 3:5-6) 

There’s only one way to defeat the pressure.  I’ve trained long enough to know what it is.  I must turn and I have to face it.

But it’s difficult.  His pressure is so good.

From the corner of my eye—just at the edge of my vision—I can see the dim figure of my coach.  He’s standing just a short distance away watching me intently.  I remember that he was the one who sent me into this fight.  He told me to come spar with this grappler because he knew it would be good for me.  He was the one who told me I could beat this guy.  Would he lie to me?  He knows exactly what I’m capable of and he knows what my opponent is capable of.

He doesn’t have to say anything.  My coach is my coach and he’s trained me to find his eyes, even in the most difficult of situations.  It’s difficult—it requires what feels like a massive amount of effort.  I turn my eyes and my head follows.  Now he fills my vision.  By turning my eyes, I turn my head and turning my head turns me to face the pressure.

It is here, from somewhere on the other side of my opposition, that my God Savior does a thing that I sometimes do an instructor. He moves himself right into my line of view. He looks at me and captures my eyes. I couldn't have done that work. I couldn't have moved myself, so he moved Himself to a place where I could look him in the eyes.

“Follow my eyes”, I hear Him say as he begins to move just a little bit closer. There's a moment of doubt, but I have nothing to lose—not anymore. Sometimes I learn the best things where I have nothing to lose, and I think God knows that about me.

(Colossians 3:2)  Set your minds on what is above, not on what is on the earth.

So, I make the choice to go ahead and follow Him as he starts to move.  Where the eyes go the head follows and, even though there's pressure, I sense an opening because I'm not focused on finding it. I'm not focused on the weight, I'm not focused on the anxiety. I'm focused on the place that's where my eyes are supposed to follow. As I follow, I find a small opening, almost accidentally. It moves me to a familiar position—a place that I know how to fight back from.  Now I can slowly start to affect my escape. This is where my metaphor breaks down, because on the mats we only face one opponent at a time.  My opponents rest secure in the fact that they only have to worry about fighting me.  But in God's economy, in the spiritual realm that he created and where He exists, He reserves the right to step into my fight. When He sees that I'm struggling, and when he sees that I can't quite find a solution, He allows Himself to directly intervene.

No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to humanity. God is faithful, and He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation He will also provide a way of escape so that you are able to bear it.  (1 Corinthians 10:13) 

I imagine that God could immediately solve any fight that He steps into, including the one that I’m losing.  But that’s not always what He does—in fact, I think He seldom does.  He knows me too well.  I need to learn how to fight, not how to have my problems solved.

His intervention is subtle and nuanced—two things that I have never been able to grasp.  I think He's going to make me do a little bit of work, because if He doesn’t, I'm not going to learn a thing about being under pressure. Sure, I'll learn that my God can rescue me, but what happens when a tougher opponent comes along?  What will happen when that tougher opponent is me again?

I've learned a weird dichotomy in this process—God is going to fight for me but He's always going to invite me to fight at His side. I'll be like a child swinging a toy sword, but at least I’ll be part of the battle.   I'm going to grow in strength, and He's going to smile and laugh while He cuts down my opponents.

From there, my anxiety transforms into eagerness and eagerness is a lot like anticipation.  I find myself looking forward to what God is planning to do next.