High Anxiety

The cover of this week's Time Magazine is a headscratcher.  Anxiety's good for you?  This is big news to me. My personal theme song, courtesy of Mel Brooks:  High anxiety, whenever you’re near/ High anxiety, it’s you that I fear... Anxiety entered my life at birth, if not sooner. I was born in a car in the hospital parking lot. The whole thing made me pretty jumpy out the gate and set the tone for a lifetime of inspired what-iffing and riffing on various imaginative personal catastrophes. Growing up, anxiety hid behind the door, biding its time.  In my early, post-college twenties, it pounced at me and said "boo." So I ran like hell, all the way to a grandfatherly, Freudian shrink with white hair, a white beard and a thick German accent, straight out of Central Casting.  "What's wrong with me?" I asked.  "You're a little nervous," he said.  I went to another shrink, a smart lady with short brown hair.  "What's wrong with me?" I asked.  "You're very nervous," she said.  I went to a support group full of very very nervous women. Very nervous didn't seem so bad, compared to very very.  I started to calm down a little.  Each decade brought a new therapist or two, a fresh look at anxiety.  Eventually, with a little chemical help, I found a way to kick anxiety in the ass. I got a little tougher. I turned my what-if's into so-eff'n-what's. It finally occurred to me that I can't control much of anything, anyway.  What a revelation.  Maybe someone could have told me this sooner?  Even so, no matter how fancy Time Magazine gets with it, how cerebral, how "this study said this, this study said that," anxiety has no "likes" on its fan page.  Anxiety is a bad road trip and some of us just get stuck in the back seat, till the car pulls over and lets us out, to pick up a new passenger.