Anxiety

    I once read (in fact it was a line from a James Bond book) that worrying is paying a dividend to disaster before it's due.
    In which case over the past few days some lucky disaster has been the beneficiary of a real windfall, complements of me.
    For the past few days I've been in a state of anxious worry, aka Anxiety.
    Anxiety is my pet peeve, my bete noir . 
    On the other hand it does keep my weight in check.  I do believe if I could kick back, relax, and take life in stride I'd immediately pack on twenty pounds. But if I could kick back, relax, and take life in stride the twenty pounds would be worth it. 

Obviously, I wasn't always all that anxious, right?

    But now I am.  Not all the time.  But sometimes. Like now.
    Sometimes my anxiety is free-floating.  Sometimes it's event-specific. 
    Anxiety  causes people like me to mislabel life's occasional set-backs or bouts of turbulence as disasters, when in truth we're  just worried that the turbulence will never settle, that we'll never recover from the set-back, which we assume will lead then to actual disaster.
    But then we do recover, things do settle back to normal, and we've just shelled out a small fortune in  gratuitous worry.
    But Anxiety doesn't only rob me of the serenity to accept the things I cannot change as well as the wisdom to know the difference between what I can and cannot change. 
    It hits me with writer's block.
    Over the past few days Anxiety has been hanging around, making me pay dividends to some non-existent, undeserving disaster while it's been keeping me from writing.
    People who are in the grip of  mental disquiet sometimes say that they just can't get out of their head.
    When I'm feeling anxious I seem to  have the opposite problem.  It's like I can't get into my head.
    It's like Anxiety has hacked into my cerebral hard-drive and stomped each of my ideas with that big grey screen with the meh face that says:

        I still have the ideas but the inspiration that creates the words to flesh out the ideas are locked behind that little red-orange meh face.
    Meanwhile my mental disquiet  starts taking on a corporeal manifestation in my imagination as a big purple monster with blank white eyes and horns, sort of an evil Sesame Street character called  - what else - Anxiety.
    As my attempts to express my ideas fall flat without the inspiration needed to make them float,  Anxiety whispers in my ear,  "Don't even bother. Nobody cares  what you think about why the Amish might have started opening up to outsiders.  Or Isis destroying the ancient art of a people.  Or your daughter's quarantine."
    To which I reply, "It doesn't matter whether anybody cares about what I write.  It only matters that I care."
    To which Anxiety, moving even closer to my ear, hisses, "But right now even you don't  care. Right now all you can focus on is me, me, me!"
    "Fine,   I snap at this figment of of my fretful imagination, come in sit down, make yourself at home, why don't you.  How about a cup of tea."
    "Sure,"  quips Anxiety, settling its big self into a chair at my kitchen table,  "But you're still not getting back into your head."
    Except that, by writing this, I already am.