Using Determination to Overcome Anxiety

Determination helps me overcome anxiety. White-knuckled stubbornness. Hours spent thinking to myself, "anxiety cannot win." Sometimes this is rather like yelling at the sea to stop making so many waves but in spite of that, it works for me. For a trait that's usually frowned upon, stubbornness, determination, has its uses to overcome anxiety.

My Determination to Overcome Anxiety

I'd make protest banners but that seems a little over the top. The point is I want to win. I want so badly to win, to beat the panic, to make my life my life that even my worst traits (stubbornness is far from my worst trait) must be harnessed in the effort. It's like war rationing: make do and mend. With less sewing.

I want to cherish every ounce of calm I can scrounge from the garbage pails of compulsion so I do back alley deals with myself, promising that tomorrow I can rest if I just keep going today because I have to win - damn the cost. I have to win because it's my life, and I have the right to be anxiety free, a right not to be sucker-punched by flashbacks in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping, when all seemed quiet on the Western Front. A right to be standing here, doing my thing, without having to worry all the time.

Active Minds, Overcoming Anxiety

It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Which is an incredibly poetic way of saying

• A. Be stubborn. no seriously, you can do better than that, keep going, don't give up, this sucks mightily for all of us and we're all in it together, and
• B. No matter what you're going through you are vital and necessary and most importantly, here.

That really isn't the worst message to give someone struggling with anxiety. It doesn't sugar coat or patronize, which a lot of purportedly inspirational texts do a great deal of, and I can't stand.

Determination just stands there, like a guard at the gates to a palace. Stoic, implacable, solid. And it is that solidity which is so often absent when anxiety strikes up the band. That same solidity can help one cope with the quiet times. When the mind starts churning, the PTSD whirling around like black clouds inside and it needs somewhere to go, as much as I need it to leave me alone.