anxiety

If you've ever battled anxiety or depression or have lived with someone who does, you know how debilitating it can be. No matter how much you want the brain to cooperate, sometimes it simply won't, and it's not possible to reliably predict when that's going to happen.

I've spent years helping my college-aged daughter figure out how to best manage a severe anxiety disorder. She's a bright young woman who really wants to do her best, but the anxiety monster in her brain makes that difficult. I've watched her knock out an impressive paper for a class in a short amount of time and I've watched her sit at the computer with a stack of sources struggling for hours to get her brain to put two coherent sentences together. Same person, same capabilities. It's not that she doesn't want to do the work or that she isn't trying, it's just that she's in a constant battle with her anxiety monster, and sometimes the monster wins.

I liken it to a person who has a bum knee that gives out at random times. They may have exercises and therapies to try to keep it from going out, and some days they can walk around just fine. But they may have chronic pain people don't see and sometimes things happen that can't be predicted—a wonky staircase, a longer-than-anticipated trek, an icy sidewalk—that can throw things off and suddenly make them incapacitated.