I’ve described my anxiety before on this blog. I’ve talked about it in terms of improv and I’ve talked about how I’m dealing with it. And if you know me at all, you know that it’s just part of my life. But there’s something about reading other peoples’ experience with it that is really soothing for me. I suppose that’s a bit ironic, that reading about anxiety would allay my anxiety but it does. The first book that helped me with it was On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety by Andrea Petersen. Now I’m reading 10% Happier by Dan Harris.

Andrea Petersen helped me because she talked so much about her physical fears, how she would scan her body for problems. I talked about how I did that with my foot drop over the past summer. I’ve done it many times before, though, that’s just one example. Hearing someone else experience that really helped me.

I’m only halfway through Dan Harris’s book but it’s helping me in a few ways. First, he’s describing all of the ways that he’s been skeptical of meditation and all the ways that he’s had difficulty with it. Feeling any sort of distracting physical sensation meditating or having really mundane thoughts really get in the way of meditating but you just keep practicing anyway. But it’s when he fears for the worst that I identify with him the most. He talks about his competition with and jealousy of co-workers. He talks about fears of losing it all. In one instance he talks about looking in the mirror and seeing his hairline and worrying for his career. And that’s it, he thinks, he’ll go bald, then lose his job, then end up in a flophouse in Duluth.

The flophouse in Duluth shows up many times in the book.

So, a couple of things with this. First, I hate it when the fully haired like Dan Harris complain about their hairlines. Brother, you don’t even know. But I’ll let that slide. Second, I had to look up what a flophouse was. I mean, I had an idea but I didn’t really know. Apparently it’s just a crappy hotel. But third, and most important, this is how I think all the time. Whenever I think about work or lack of it, I always go to being destitute. My flophouse in Duluth is my parents’ basement in Rochester.

I thought about this last summer when I was underemployed with freelance web work. I’ve let my skills deteriorate and I only have myself to blame. I’m going to lose my apartment and I’ll end up in my parents’ basement in Rochester.

If you know me, you might point out that this is impossible given that my parents are dead and they no longer have a house in Rochester. Similarly, Dan Harris is not from Duluth, so, I don’t know why he fears that flophouse so much. I suppose it just goes to show how unrealistic the fear is.

But it is there. That fear never leaves. The anxiety ridden mind knows the limits of everything. It knows the deepest fears and it goes there, quickly. I’ve spoken to a few people about this and I think everyone has their own personal basement in Rochester or flophouse in Duluth.

Sometimes I think I need it because it’s this fear that lights a fire under my ass and keeps me working. The more I meditate, though, the more I realize that it’s just a thought and I can let it go. I assure you that I have yet to attain enlightenment. Worry will be part of my life every day in some form but I’m slowly allowing the basement in Rochester to lose its power. I’m starting to see it for what it is, some strange set in my mind’s eye for a play that will never be produced.