Ned! Ned Ryerson!!

Anxiety:  (pathology)  A state of restlessness and agitation, often accompanied by a distressing sense of oppression or tightness in the stomach.

"Prone to anxiety" may be one of the greatest phrases ever uttered in the English language.

I had a friend many years ago who suffered a series of panic attacks.  

"They were profoundly uncomfortable," he said dryly.

Anxiety is such a nancy word.  We do a mambo with fear, dressing it up in all kinds of fancy outfits and period costumes.  We use anger when we want to be a bad-ass.  We use depression when we want some attention.  We use stress when we want to seem busy.  It's all fear.  It's all fear.  We are afraid that we won't get something that we want or we're afraid that we're going to lose something that we already have, and that covers everything, my friends.

Isn't it worrisome that one of the definitions of anxiety includes the ominous qualifier: "pathology"?

Pathology:  Any deviation from a healthy or normal condition; abnormality. 

I had another friend, a heroin addict, who talked about his worry scanner.  He flicked it on and watched the little red light blink sequentially through a series of channels until it found something to worry about.  It was tireless, this device, always working, always searching for something that was wrong or was going to go wrong.

There's a famous circuit speaker who tells about a high-powered job he had before he lapsed into homelessness.  He showed up every day at work, dressed to kill, in a construct of extreme self-confidence meant to convince everyone that he wasn't, you know, insane.   Every day his boss asked him how he was doing and every day he said that he was doing great.

"Once, just once," he recalled.  "I wanted to say: 'I'm terrified.' "

"What's the matter," he imagined his boss saying.

"Beats the hell out of me," he would have been forced to reply.

While I'm prone to anxiety I have a hell of a toolkit today.  I have taken that worry scanner apart many times.  That worry scanner is right out of Groundhog Day.  I can't kill it.  It's alive! 

Actually I'm doing well this morning and I do well often.  But I'm aware of that proneness, hovering in the sky above my head, like a big carrion-feeding vulture.