Anxiety

When I got married at 22 I had a vague notion of anxiety. I thought it was an emotion, something you suffered from time to time based on significant events looming overhead. My experience with anxiety in college was something like this. A huge project would be underway. Perhaps on Friday we would have a pin-up (critique) in a classroom. The visiting speaker (a hot shot architect who is respected enough that he is hired by universities to come and speak) for the evening would join our class and, along with our vocal professors, give us feedback on our ideas. This is nerve wracking, it haunts you. But with time you learn a few tricks. 1) if you stay up for two days and only sleep during your non-essential classes, then you are past tired, and are complacent. the comments don't sting like you think they should because you are not thinking like you should 2) after a couple of years you're sufficiently humbled to know that you are not anyone special and you, along with everyone else, is going to be thrashed anyway (if you aren't, then your classmates give you a pat on the back afterwards) Thus anxiety, although real, was something I experienced a few times a semester, in front of a none too polite judge panel with a crowd of 15-100 people watching. Any other experience I had after that was a cake walk.
I did not know that anxiety can be part of a person's genetic makeup. That it can permeate every moment of one's life. That things like indoor recess, public bathrooms, and dental floss can be coated in it. I didn't know that abnormal or over reactions could be attributited to it. I didn't realize that anxiety is common and that a lot of people are enduring it, some vocally and most very quietly. I only this morning (at 4am to be exact) realized that anxiety can effect work ethic: you can become daunted by any seemingly difficult task and give up before you even start.
I don't know how to teach my child how to deal with it. Obviously my two steps above are not going to work when it comes to problems like having a substitute on a Tuesday. I still don't have any sympathy; I can't grasp what is really going on. I have a vague idea what must be going through his head, but I have never experienced anything remotely close to it. So, my tact has been to plow through it, ignore it, or face it only when I absolutely have to. Thankfully the Lord knows all of both sides of this story and he does give me clues and suggestions. At 4:30am after I came to understand one part of it, he gave me the outline for an action plan for combating the daily battle of homework and talent improvement. May Heaven help us so that I can do a little better everyday to fight the gene called anxiety.