Anxious Living

Transitions and Choices

October 4th, 2006 by Aaron

I’m going through something of a transitional moment in life, coming out of a long relationship, and reconsidering a few important things about what I want to do with my future. This uncertainty is making my anxiety flair. I can feel it in simple moments, things as harmless as making the phone calls to have the power, gas and phone turned off. I’m not incapacitated by any stretch of the imagination, but I can feel a tension in having to perform any task that has me interacting with other folks.

I know it has much to do with the looming threat of so many choices to make. As I posted earlier, a lifetime of doubting my own judgment has left me with a troubled relationship with deciding.

And transitional periods are all about making choices. Lots of choices. No more coasting along in a life that is fairly familiar and defined, where I only have to deal a limited amount of uncertainty. It’s so much easier to keep social anxiety under control when I have a safe base of the familiar to operate from and can pretty much pick and choose where and when I push myself.

Now I’m going to have to push myself into many more social situations. I will have to meet new people and get certain aspects of my life up and running again and my anxiety just kind of says, “Please don’t make us do this.”

When I was a kid I loved to go camping, and it’s still something I immediately think to do at times like this. I’ve begun to think that one of the things I love about it is that once I get isolated out in nature there are no decisions to be made, no other things that perhaps I should be doing, no better courses of action that I might be missing out on, no phone calls, no people I should meet. And I can just relax into enjoying what is happening. For someone who deals so often with anxious thoughts, this is an incredible moment of rest.

How can we successfully deal with transitions. Are there times when working improve social anxiety can take backseat to simply suriving social anxiety?

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