On Anxiety: May 4, 2022

These days fall into an easy rhythm as everything but the most essential is stripped away. I wake, write a bit, attend my clinic appointments at Taussig Center with my mom to have my central line flushed and my blood drawn; everyone is kind to me. We talk, read emails, plan dinners, talk some more. I do my best to parent long-distance, to love fiercely from afar. I feel focused and strangely peaceful.

What has fallen away is anxiety; it feels so light to set it down now. Before MS felt part of my identity, Covid handed me a small, hard ball of worry I carried around with me everywhere, a new burden of the immunocompromised. And I made room. But as the sense of solidarity that existed at the start of Covid ebbed, I felt abandoned, and every time I would butt up against a world that would not protect me, the edges were sharp. My innate belief that it would be okay began to fray.

This past year I have been weighted down, with anxiety sometimes heavy, swollen and dripping in my pocket. My own infection with Covid awoke the beast of MS, and each relapse and progression kept changing the trajectory of my path forward. This uncertain world, and my ever-changing and seemingly more peripheral place in it, has been difficult to navigate. And try as I might, I cannot bend the will of the world.

But here I am in Cleveland; here, I don’t need to carefully weigh every risk against someone else’s sacrifice. I don’t have to decide whether it’s safe for my children to see their friends, or go to school today, and then continually, endlessly, have to reevaluate each decision. Away from my family, I see that the anxiety I have been carrying is largely not about me, but instead about the people that I love. I can take it out of my pocket while I am here. And the unburdening makes me stronger.