anxiety Archives

In the online world, this is the time of year when prompts proliferate. Prompts about achieving your goals, creativity prompts, journaling prompts, prayer prompts, writing prompts. They’re meant to help us restart the dead batteries of our willpower, refuel our imagination, and re-inspire our hearts.

Usually, I’m all in, especially with the writing prompts. Anything to get these stiff fingers flying across my dusty keyboard.

So, I signed up for the first writing prompt challenge I came across and then “promptly” got stuck on day two.

The word prompt for that day was “light,” a word I’d carried around in my heart, studied and written and spoken about many times before, so it was odd that I felt so much resistance to write about it now.

“All I want to do is sleep”

A friend texted me in tears this morning. Unable to overcome the waves of anxiety and depression, she’d stepped out of the office and was hiding in the hallway, trying desperately to stop crying. “Nothing helps besides sleep,” she wrote. “I just want to go home and sleep.”

My heart broke for her. I remember hiding in the restroom at work, trying to control my own flow of tears. It felt like 5:00 would never come and all I wanted to do was to cry myself to sleep. Wake me when it’s over; like a turtle, I wanted to hibernate.

Imagine being able to simply shut down and snooze for a long period every year –doesn’t that sound heavenly? Preferably right after the last leaves fall until, oh, I don’t know… April 16th? Works for me.

Yea, if I’m honest, my weight is a cause for anxiety but we’re gonna’ save that post for when I’m feeling a little more courageous. Today I want to talk about the weight of anxiety, that sense of heaviness that makes you respond to life as if you’re carrying around an extra fifty pounds. I wish there was a scale to register that kind of weight.

My issues with anxiety began when I was a young mother, but here’s the thing—nobody talked about anxiety back then other than to say things like, “My nerves are shot.”

That weird, gnawing feeling I had in my gut every single morning when I woke up? I had no idea it was anxiety. It never occurred to me to mention it to my doctor, so I basically just got used to feeling bad.

As a young Christian that just felt wrong. It’s not normal for Christians to feel this bad, right? I felt bad. Therefore I must be bad. That made my stomach feel even worse.

SUSAN ELY

anxiety

Open to the Light – a prompt and a prayer

When all you want to do is sleep

“All I want to do is sleep”

Anxiety and What I Did About My Weight Problem

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