I have struggled with anxiety for many years. It started when I was 19 and serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Argentina. It continued throughout my undergraduate college degree, law school, and to this day in my profession as a criminal defense attorney.
My anxiety has taken away most of my emotions. I can't feel happy, joyful, sad, or fearful. I can't feel satisfied, buoyant, or angry. Mostly, I only feel anxious, frustrated, and irritated.
I don't look forward to anything. I don't find joy or satisfaction in anything that used to make me feel deeply.
At times my anxiety almost turns to despair. I don't know why. Everything in my life seems to be going well on the outside. But inside something is wrong. I don
I reached a turning point today. As I walked out to my car after work, I could feel myself hit a wall, a dead end. I had worked all day, and worked well, but I was unsatisfied. Something wasn't right.
I felt the need for a paradigm shift. For years I have worked hard and never felt complete. I needed to change something. In that moment, my life felt like an endless series of tasks that were impossible to complete. I was ever running, but never reaching the end of the race. The end of each day was not a happy reflection on goals achieved, but a melancholy anticipation of new works to be done the following day.
As I pondered these things on my way home, I wondered what kind of paradigm shift I could seek. In the car, I thought that perhaps the problem was that I was focused on achieving results, and not sufficiently on the process of achieving those results. Perhaps I needed to worry less about finishing a task, and enjoy the process of doing the task.
I considered how I felt, and realized that a great deal of my anxiety comes during the process of work. For example, my mom emails me once a week, and I read her emails on Sunday morning. But I never really enjoy reading them. I feel rushed, and I just want to get through the email, because there are other things that I need to do.
I work with the Boy Scouts of America, and the same thing happens there. For example, as I'm getting ready for summer camp, I feel rushed to plan the meals and the activities. As the time for summer camp nears, my anxiety increases exponentially. I eventually reach a fit of anxiety that pushes everything else out of my mind. I become a machine, shoving out of the way everything and everyone that distracts me from achieving my goal of being prepared for Scout camp.
And then when Scout camp comes, I don't enjoy it. I am constantly anxious about being ready for the next meal or activity, having everyone accounted for, making sure we are meeting the schedule, making sure that the Scouts don't use too many paper plates. It is all a headache. And even if everything goes off smoothly, and I achieve the goal I set out to accomplish, I don't enjoy it. I just start thinking about the next camp, and worrying about what I need to do to prepare for it.
I'm doing it as I write this first post. I set a timer next to me for 30 minutes. I decided when I started writing that I was going to simply enjoy the writing process, and not worry about the result. But I can feel, inside me, the anxious urge to type as fast as I can, to tear through the post, because there are other projects that I need to work on and other results I need to achieve. And my inside doesn't want me to leave a blog post unfinished. The drive inside of me toward results-oriented living is great. It will be difficult to change.
So I am coining a phrase, "process-oriented philosophy," and I'm going to post to this blog about my journey to change from a results-oriented way of living to one in which I focus on and enjoy the processes of working, playing, and living, in an attempt to reduce my anxiety and increase my own happiness.
I don't think I'm actually coining the phrase, as I've been able to find it in a few other publications through a Google search. But I'm committing to living it. I'm committing to leaving things undone. I'm committing to finding satisfaction in the drive it takes to get to work, and not in the arrival at my office. I'm committing to enjoying the process of research, and not the submission of pleadings to the court. I'm committing to enjoying the happiness of doing homework with my kids, and not looking forward to the final math problem so that I can move on to something else.
I haven't finished this blog post to satisfaction, but I have tried to find joy in writing it. It isn't grammatically perfect, nor is it written in correct tense or my preferred tone. But I've been able to feel something as I've written it. I want to continue to make that feeling grow.
I'm committing to changing myself fundamentally.
