I had an excellent session with my counselor a few days ago. While in the waiting room, I thought about the productive two weeks I’d just had. I jotted down a list of things I wanted to talk about. So we talked about a lot. We talked about safe places, we talked about mindfulness, we talked about “feeding the wolves inside.”

But then something else came up, which I found fascinating. It wasn’t on my list, and I don’t even remember how we got there. I started to wonder this: Whenever I feel anxiety, do I turn that anxiety into depression?

It came up because I made some reference to “every time I experience anxiety.” My counselor said, “In all the time we’ve been meeting, I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about anxiety. We always talk about depression.” This really surprised me. I mean, I know that I wear depression around my neck as my identity. (My nametag reads, “HELLO MY NAME IS Pastor with Depression.”) But I also know that I experience anxiety quite a lot as well. I couldn’t believe we’d never talked about it in the ten years we’ve been meeting.

I know that I’ve talked with him many times about how I feel when someone is angry or hurt because of something I did. I know that I’ve told him about how frozen I get, how stuck I get, how I can’t concentrate or think straight. That’s my experience of anxiety. But I wonder…

I wonder if I’ve always defined that as “depression.” Because by the time I get to his office to talk about it, I’m not really feeling that frozen, stuck feeling anymore. I’m feeling something else. And I wonder if I’ve found a really strange coping mechanism for anxiety. I think maybe I’ve developed the skill of transforming anxiety into depression.

Depression and anxiety are like siblings, always lurking and ready to pounce. And while they sometimes act in tandem, I experience each of them differently. Anxiety feels to me like an unseen hand squeezing my head, making my brain feel like it’s constricted, as though I don’t have access to all my faculties. (Which, I believe, is actually true – the neocortex becomes unavailable during moments of anxiety.) It feels like a tightening in my chest as well – like my heart too is being squeezed. It feels “itchy” all over, like I’m covered with insects that keeping biting and stinging. It’s incredibly uncomfortable and unbearable. It feels like hell to me. I hate that feeling.

Depression, on the other hand, feels like a thick blanket covering and smothering me. It obscures and blurs my senses, it makes the air around me taste stale and old; it is heavy and, in a way, cozy. It’s dark and lonely, but it’s also quiet and cool. It’s comfortable and familiar. It’s terrible, and it keeps me stuck and motionless, but while it does that, it lulls me to sleep. Depression does not feel like hell to me. It has a strange allure to it.

So my counselor and I were talking about the importance of “sitting with” anxiety or depression, and I realized that I am so much better at sitting with depression. Sometimes, I sit with it for weeks on end. I am safe there. (Sort of.) I am comfortable there. (Sort of.) I am home there. (Oooh, that’s problematic, but in some ways true.)

Depression is like home – anxiety is like hell. They’re both terrible, in their own ways. But somehow I have carved myself a hovel in the land of depression. Somehow, I have built myself a little hobbit hole, a place where I feel at rest. I’ve staked a claim there.

So here’s what I wonder – I wonder if I am so uncomfortable in anxiety that I have found a way to transform it into depression. When anxiety gets me so itchy and so miserable, I wonder if I turn that inward, and force it into something more familiar, more welcome. I can imagine what that mechanism might look like, from a narrative standpoint. Let’s look at what makes me most anxious of all – when I feel that I’ve done something wrong, when I’ve done something that has upset or hurt someone. Here’s how it goes inside:

I am anxious. I have done something wrong, and it feels horrible. I feel the constriction, the itching, the squeezing. I do not like this. This is something I want to get rid of quickly.

Why did this happen? Why am I feeling this way? I know why. Because I’m an idiot. Because I should have known better. Because I always screw up like this.

This was not simply a mistake I made. This was something bigger. This is a sign of what I always do, a sign of who I am at my core: a mistake. A broken, unclean, useless mistake. I am worthless. I am meaningless. This is about my identity. I am wrong.

And the heavy cloak of depression starts to fall over me, numbing me from the itch and constriction. I am covered, smothered, protected from the anxiety.

And there I am. Instead of sitting with the anxiety, I panic and turn the anxiety into depression. And in doing so, I wonder if I end up staying miserable for much longer than I need to. I wonder…if I just sat with the anxiety, would it pass more quickly than the depression would? Would the terrible itchiness last only a short time compared to how long I sit in my hole?

I don’t know any of this for sure. It’s funny, I think I know myself so well, but I am questioning whether everything I’ve written here is right or not. I think I want to test this theory. Next time I feel anxious, I’m going to try to be mindful. I’m going to try to sit with it, and see how that goes. I’m going to try to fight any urge I have to make it worse on myself in the long run by diving headlong into depression. We’ll see.

Featured image by Sebastian Ganso from Pixabay