Anxiety and fear lived a long time as irascible and inseparable roommates in my life. Everywhere I moved, they came along. I kicked out some fears along the way, leaving them to fend for themselves on the streets. Today, a struggling little Anxiety family still occupies a few mental and emotional back rooms, and likes to stir up trouble in the neighborhood from time to time.

Lemony Snickett, in A Series of Unfortunate Events, defined anxiety as being “troubled by a disturbing suspense.” This definition spoke to me. In fact, it awakened me to a greater consciousness and self-awareness about the impact of my little family of final resistance, my Anxiety Squatters. I wrote it down, on a little sticky note.

On a white square of paper,

scrawled in my own hand, is

“troubled by a disturbing suspense.”

Anxiety is troubling physically and emotionally. It jangles my nervous system and stirs my guts around with big paddles of worry and stress. Anxiety sits heavily between my shoulder blades, driving them forward to cradle my heart. Little stunted wings that they are, my clavicles trend is to curl forward around my tender center, striving to protect me from…?

Anxiety disturbs. It interferes, pushes in where it’s not wanted, speaks too loudly in public places. Anxiety interrupts the capacity for staying in this moment now, with you. Who does she think she is? Effin’ bully.

Finally, anxiety is an unknown, a suspense. Most important to me in Snickett’s definition is the suspense aspect of anxiety, as to the source of disturbance, as to what makes it troubling. Anxiety is a state of being troubled by “a disturbing suspense.”

I sit with this aspect of the phrase a lot, letting it reveal its layers of meaning to me one at a time.

First, and most simply, as narrator Lemony explained to readers, anxiety is about an unknown, a suspense, whereas fear is about something quite known and present in the moment. Anxiety is about something “out there”…some unseen echo from my past or unawares projection onto my future. Thus, I am forever in suspense about what is disturbing me, even as it deeply troubles my life.

I remember how I used to try to explain to myself and others all my nervous habits. Why did I chew and pick at my cuticles, pull out my hair, scratch and twitch and fiddle and fidget all the time? “Can’t you sit still??” Mom’s frustrated voice is this soundtrack, in memory after memory of my childhood. No, in fact, I couldn’t…and I couldn’t tell you why. I was in suspense, as much as much as Mom or anyone else.

Secondly, anxiety suspends me. It holds me up, waylays me. I am dissolved in water, held in suspension, absorbed into my feeling. Pulled out of what is, I swim invisibly in my own worry and fear, showing up nowhere as real.

I spent so much time–oh! so much time!–trying to align myself with the millions of expectations I believed were all around me. Trapped between worry about the wrong impression I may have made the last time (Did she notice how I pulled out my hair, even though I tried to do it surreptitiously? Did I fit in? Did I ask too many questions? Too few?), and the impression I was about to make (Do I look fatter in this outfit? Is my makeup okay? What should I say? Will I fit in?), I was nearly paralyzed on most occasions. In fact, sometimes I was so immobilized by anxiety that I had to cancel meetings or participation in some gatherings. This reclusive horror of being seen in all my messy glory is is commonly referred to as “social anxiety,” an overly tame name for how unmanageable it feels to be dissolved in–suspended in–an ocean of feelings that say I am under threat, in danger, about to die. The term is too tame because the suspense is not what it appears to be: the “Will I fit in?” question. Not about that, at all.

Finally, anxiety holds me up in another sense. It suspends me above the fray, in a way. It holds me up, away, aloft, far beyond reality’s bumpy road. Yeah, that sounds good at first–new perspective and all–but, sadly, no. This form of suspension is more like classic dissociation…or like school suspension. My perspective is pulled out of Now and over to a vantage point of “I am not present.” Disconnected from my body, I float in a plane of existence that is a refuge of my own making. I receive no new perspective; I simply disconnect and leave you talking with my avatar, while I travel to a place of…pause, let us call it. Anxiety makes me a refugee from my own life.

“Troubled by a disturbing suspense.” Anxiety is troubling, disturbing. It keeps me focused on a suspense, an unknown. I believe that therein lies my solution. What is this thing, about which I am in suspense? What is the question that troubles? Perhaps revealing that which has been hidden, that which is in suspense, is the ultimate answer.

For me, I think my remaining anxiety keeps me living with this question between my shoulders: “Will It Happen Again?” As a survivor of childhood sexual assault, that seems a reasonable question about which to be in suspense…especially for the many children in me who carry the memories of those experiences. I am even seeing that, over my 30+ years of recovery work, the suspenseful question may have shifted, from “WHEN will it…? to “Will it?” That, at least, seems like progress.

If you co-habitate with Anxiety, can you name the disturbing suspense that troubles you? Can you pull that thread from the weave? Dig up that root? Break the spell? Perhaps you’d care to join me in drawing up eviction papers for your Anxiety Squatters?