How many anxiety-plagued people does it take to screw in an overhead lightbulb? Zero. We all worry that the stepladder will break and that we’ll fall to the ground, helpless to get up until someone finds us. Days later.

Welcome to my life.

Those of you who read my blog regularly may remember a post from last June, almost exactly a year ago, in which I spoke about my experience with my ongoing anxiety – how I’ve always lived with it but how it had gotten more extreme, it seemed, with each passing year. It had stopped me in my tracks and forced me to finally face it head on in order to try to deal with it.

I was so surprised to hear back from so many people that they, too, were trying to cope with what we, in our home, call The Beast (not so affectionately, I might add). In writing this piece about how it’s all going – and it’s so much harder than I would have imagined – I’m hoping to offer some comfort to all my fellow anxiety warriors. To paraphrase the words of Ted Kennedy in speaking about something else entirely, “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives.” Grand words for something far bigger than my subject, but the sentiment struck me as right on the money. The work and the hope are the things that matter the most.

I’d like to say that I’ve been progressing forward at a slow but steady pace; truthfully, though, I’d have to say that the pace is more slow and less steady that I had hoped. It’s hard. It’s a struggle. And so many of us live with this on a daily basis.

So which would you rather hear first – the good news or the bad? Because I’m anxious, that means I won’t hear anything good that anyone says if I know that there’s bad news to follow (fun, yes?), so I’ll start with the bad.

Some days it feels like I’ve made no progress, like everything is an emergency, like every day is a potential catastrophe waiting to happen (although I’m no good at sports, if catastrophizing were an Olympic event, I’d medal every time). Every physical ailment gets exaggerated into something possibly serious; every wrinkle in life becomes a possible Grand Canyon; every new thing potentially becomes something to dread. Fear, uncertainty, indecision, and far-less-than-ideal coping skills are part of most days in some form or another, some days milder than others, some days enough to make me want to hide beneath a pile of milk chocolate and watch I Love Lucy reruns (a shout out to the chocolate factory episode, of course, as well as the one with Harpo Marx).

The good news? (Please let her tell us something good, you’re thinking, because now she’s making us anxious.). The good news is that I have gotten to a place where I can identify The Beast as the one who’s doing the talking. Most of the time. I can realize that it’s my anxiety that’s causing me to feel the way I do, to react the way I react, to inflate life’s challenges to end-of-the-world status. Thanks to a wonderful, compassionate therapist, I am starting to make baby steps’ worth of progress – although for someone who was a perpetual A-student, anything less than perfection is so disappointing. I had thought, mistakenly it seems, that once I started therapy, I’d have had this conquered much more quickly. I figured that all I needed was someone qualified to listen and I’d be anxiety-light in a matter of months. It doesn’t work that way.

My anxiety has deep roots in my relationship with my mother (a stereotype, I know, but in my case, it is the truth) and her undealt-with anxiety; talk therapy has peeled that open for me and it does help some. My therapist has also given me a “toolbox” of things that could help – mindfulness, meditation, and cognitive behavioral therapy approaches – things that can make a difference. 

The challenge is remembering to use those tools and being capable of using them when I become so anxious. While all are sound and proven techniques, it’s often difficult to find the reasonableness to put them into motion when I’m having a panic attack or my mind is racing with what-ifs.

The New York girl in me finds it hard to believe, sometimes, that these things will really work. The California girl in me wants to embrace it all. The Beast in me can kick them both to the curb.

Of course, today’s world doesn’t make it simple. Even the least anxious of people can’t help but feel the unease. For those of us who suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, the current news cycles are hell. Getting older makes it more difficult as well; my resilience, my acceptance of change (never a strong point to begin with), my confidence – all of these things wilt under the eye of The Beast. In addition, B. and I are in the midst of several actual medical issues (these are legit, I promise) and the stress of those added to the mix makes for one potent anxiety cocktail.

Speaking of B., I don’t think I can ever thank him enough for his never-wavering support through all of this – his love, his loyalty, and his living out the vow of “for better or worse” are extraordinary to me. Anxiety doesn’t only affect the person going through it; it takes an enormous toll on the one person who loves them more than anything.

Being able to identify the enemy each time a situation arises is a positive. Knowing that panic attacks, although they feel awful, can’t kill me; knowing that for all the times I’ve faced similar moments of dread, I’ve gotten through them; understanding that so many situations I’ve faced before and thought would lead to disaster were indeed grossly inflated – all of that also helps some.

To be honest (brutally) as I sit here writing this, I have the same worry that I faced last year that forced this adventure into finally dealing with anxiety. We’re scheduled to go away in a few weeks on a road trip up to northern California, and part of that trip (farther than we usually go) scares me. It’s too far away and too remote, I fear. What if something bad happens along the way to B. (don’t even get me started about my worrying about something happening to him) or to me? Honestly, getting from here, at my desk, to up there feels like it’s going to take a miracle. I wrote last year about how giving in to the anxiety makes one’s world smaller. Right now, It’s a Small World is playing on a continuous loop in my mind (that song itself can make one anxious – anxious for it to stop).

Many of you may be wondering about anti-anxiety medication and if I’m taking it. I was on medication many years ago for many years and hated the way it made me feel. Although the anxiety has gotten more pronounced in many ways since last year because I’ve brought it out into the open in therapy and am facing it head on, the idea of taking a psychotropic medication makes me, well, more anxious. (How’s that for irony? O. Henry, master of the short-story-irony genre, has nothing on me.) Trying to balance the pros and cons is difficult; some days it feels like meds are the logical answer, other days it seems like that choice is too overwhelming. Researching natural remedies is on my current to-do list (along with remembering to take things one step at a time).

And that’s where I settle for the moment. It seems that the only choice here is to keep taking steps, small at times, missteps at times, but steps nonetheless. To try to find pieces of joy in each day and to remember to laugh and to breathe and to move. (Note to self, deep breathing can help, but not if you breathe so deeply that you hyperventilate. As I said, fun, yes?)

Aha. A lightbulb moment.

©2025 Claudia Grossman