Walking on Eggshells

An unintentionally holiday-themed post about anxiety and its solutions

In my house, we talk a lot about anxiety. I’m happy that we do this; we are all anxious people, and I think it’s good to talk about this beastie and make it a familiar. For almost my entire life, it’s been the air that I’ve breathed, so ever-present that it’s difficult to even see. It’s not something you can think yourself out of; you can’t shout at yourself to calm down (and oh, have I tried!)

I think there are so many forms of anxiety that maybe I need more words for all the flavors. And my friends have recently given me new tools for anxiety that I wanted to share below (and I am telling you this so that you don’t get anxiety about the rest of this post: there’s good stuff, too).

One version is crisis anxiety: the feeling of shit that might get worse at any second based on very credible evidence of catastrophe. This anxiety that might be the most functional, because it requires surviving minute-to-minute and actually making decisions that will impact my well-being and that of others. But it also quickly becomes a huge burden in and of itself.

My dear friend Kathy Bohley is a chaplain at the Stephanie Spielman Comprehensive Breast Center in Columbus, Ohio, and she recently recorded this beautiful video about the spiritual hit of a cancer diagnosis and how we adapt to such crises. Honestly, it applies to just about any crisis; I found myself so calmed by listening to her wise words.

A second kind of anxiety is that feeling of walking on eggshells, trying to avoid another outbreak of tension in a situation with another person, usually when that person’s behavior has some degree of chaos or unpredictability. That’s the state that I unfortunately lived in for years; that will mess you up, and some say it’s evidence of a toxic relationship. That’s powerlessness, and the magical thinking of hoping you can prevent an outburst that will surely come anyway. It also often felt to me like a kind of active mourning. When I was in this situation, I knew it was bad, and I tried to think myself out of it as well as figuring out ways to get out, and I despaired that I was in the situation. I knew it was bad for me as it was happening, and occasionally I got pissed and smashed all the eggs with a hammer.

https://themindsjournal.com/walking-on-eggshells-around-partner/#google_vignette

The weird thing about eggshells is that, depending on how you spin an egg, they actually can be very strong. Their tops and bottoms are catenary shapes, so those are the strongest for withstanding force. From this angle, you can walk on them, and they’re brilliantly made to be that way: thin and yet very stable.

Mythbusters: Can You Walk on Eggshells?

If you want to set eggshells up to walk on them, they require a ton of labor and a ton of eggs. So maybe that’s a better description of the feeling: getting up every morning to remake your own floor.

A third kind of anxiety is, I think, the freaking worst: it’s the anxiety that gets into your bones after you’ve had to walk on eggshells. In a way this is a brilliant adaptation: we learn based on our experiences. If we learn the world is dangerous, we assume that the world in the future will be dangerous. This is really, really hard to turn off. Given my new-found love for ducks, it might almost fit that you become the producer of your own eggshells. You lay the eggs that will carpet all your future floors. You lay them out carefully and systematically so that they can hold your weight, and that takes SO MUCH attention.

That Eggshell Veteran anxiety is the one that I bring into the world and that I have to work every single day at defusing. My default mode is that you’re going to yell at me. Do I seem really happy and cheerful? That’s because I’m trying to get you to be happy and like me and not explode at me.

The good thing is that I and other Eggshell Veterans have come up with all kinds of strategies for calming ourselves down. I’ve been working on this for twenty-five years or so in a Twelve-step program for friends and families of addicts and alcoholics, and in therapy, and with writing and walking and really so many other things. I sometimes wonder if I have so many wonderful things in my life because I have been forced to find beautiful and sustaining containers for my anxiety. This is not to say that I am grateful for the anxiety, but rather that I am glad I’ve been able to do and find those things to adapt. Above all, that work has been about getting mind back in my own body and my own life and away from monitoring others.

A fourth kind of anxiety is the baseline thrum that seems to emerge in relation to triggers from the outside world. I am separating this one out because I think this anxiety comes from a lot of different sources but it’s not limited to Eggshell Veterans. Maybe I’ll call this the anxiety of Late Capitalism and Hierarchy and Multiple Unfolding Disasters.

A fifth kind is the anxiety of patience, and this is maybe where I’m living now (in combination, of course, with the other flavors mentioned above). After a rough season, all the available signs point to slow and steady improvement. It’s trending positive, as my therapist says, and I picture this as dots on a graph. It’s hard to argue with: things are improving. But I don’t trust those signs, and whenever there’s a dip, I feel panic and despair and the sense that we’re going back down to the bottom. This is also the struggle anxiety of learning to live with chronic pain, which is a desire to jump ahead and mourn and imagine what it will be like if things get difficult again. I want things to happen at a certain pace; I want some kind of guarantee that we’re safe now. But instead here we are, just living in growth and unpredictability, the state of being alive itself.

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For a long time, I thought that my anxiety was protective. This is still my basic assumption, a lie my body tells me that sounds like the truth: “Shit could be coming at us from any direction. If I anticipate and imagine it, I will gain an advantage when it appears!”

Events in the last few years—well, let’s be honest, all events anytime—have showed me that my imagination of the challenges ahead is never right. It’s a kind of magical thinking that I can get my pain out of the way in advance (because lord knows, I love a to-do list.)

It’s the stuff you don’t even think to worry about that gets you. That’s empirical evidence, in a way, that worry is wasted energy, because it really is a terrible early warning system.

I have been thinking about all of this because a recent conversation with my bestie, Jenny, who lives in Ohio, led me to this podcast that she recommended, and that her husband Jeff had recommended to her. Ezra Klein talks to Jud Brewer, author of Unwinding Anxiety. I really liked this podcast and found it thought-provoking, so I ordered the book. More on that to come!

I’d love to know: what have you found that works?