Welcome to the Chronicles

To all the nervous and the neurotic; to the obsessive and the compulsive and the obsessive-compulsive; to the traumatized, the walking wounded, the brooders and the worriers, the nail-biters and the chronic sweaters; to the oversensitive and the high-strung; to the agitated and the easily excited; to the tense, the restless, the timid, the shy, the fearful, the overwhelmed, the apprehensive, the hysterical, the sleepless, the stressed out … to all of you I say: Welcome, comrades, to the Monkey Mind Chronicles!

Here you will find, as the description above states, stories, advice, and information about living with anxiety, from one who knows. Oh, I know, friends. I know! I know what it’s like to feel that knot in your stomach, that cold ache in your chest. I know what it’s like to feel your thoughts spinning out of control and your worries taking over. I know what it’s like when your logical mind packs its suitcase and leaves town and you feel for all the world as if you were going crazy or about to die, even though everything is the same as it’s always been and everyone around you is acting as if catastrophe were not about to crash down on your shoulders, the idiots. I know what it’s like to sit in a therapist’s office and wail for the shrink to help you — now, immediately, this very moment, before the nervous energy gets so bad that your hair catches on fire and you go running into the street. I know what it’s like to walk around town with a container of Xanax rattling in your pocket and Band-Aids on your chewed-up fingertips.

I know what it’s like to believe that this is a work not of Expressionism but rather of the most concrete and meticulous realism:

I know these things, I have known them for a long time, and I would like to share with you what I know about anxiety. And, in return, I would like you to share with me what you know about living with anxiety.

Why? Because together we might learn a few things about what anxiety is, and what it means, and how to combat it. And because there are a lot of us — more than fifty million and counting, just in the U.S. — and we might as well talk. We might as well gather and trade notes. Who knows? It might just help.

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