can we talk about anxiety?

Can we talk about anxiety? …because May is Mental Health Awareness month and it seems like a good time to share that I talk to my anxiety.

Let’s rewind a minute. I’ve never thought of myself as anxious. And then someone close to me was sharing how their anxiety manifests and my first reaction was to say, “But that’s just norm… ooooooooohhhhh.”

So I’ve never been diagnosed as having anxiety, and it’s never been an overriding theme in my life, but there’s probably a spectrum, right? At some point, I recognized a certain low-grade, always there, workday anxiety that — luckily for me — largely went away when I stopped eating gluten.

But anxiety still visits occasionally and, because I know it’s my primitive brain just trying to survive, I’ve decided to befriend it. So it pops up and I say, “Oh, hello, nice of you to come round and try to keep me safe, but I’m actually just doing my thing and it would be more helpful if you’d just leave.” And sometimes that works.

If it doesn’t, I sit with it for a bit, breathing deeply and getting conscious in my body. That often calms me.

And if that doesn’t work, I usually shove it aside and say, “Fine. I’m doing it anyway.”

I know these tactics don’t work for everyone. Some people need more support; some people need less. And sometimes the people who need less need more, while sometimes the people who needed more need less.

Let’s normalize that we all have stuff, and sometimes we’re carrying more than others.

How do you manage your stuff?

(c) 2025 Angela Rae Bushman, all rights reserved