we don't want no drama.

This was originally about depression, but it is everything I've been trying to say but lacked the elegance.

"Anxiety is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation.


"Anxiety is humiliating.


"If you’ve never had anxiety, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of an anxiety disorder over an averagely turbulent normal life.

"It's not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If anxiety has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too.


"Anxiety is humiliating.


"No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself.

"Anxiety is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a person with an anxiety disorder may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their anxiety. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.”