I did something I haven’t done in a long while today.
I walked.
Now, I know what you’re thinking “Meg, you walk everyday.”

It’s true, but not like I used too.

Back when I lived in Orange County my friends nicknamed me Moses, because sometimes, when I would get home meandering somewhere in my rainbows my feet would look like I had just walked through the desert.

Today I walked 2.6 miles.

The past month or so, Sundays have been harder than normal.

Going to church has catapulted my anxiety in more ways than I can describe and if I’m being honest I have had absolutely no clue why.

Two Sundays ago I actually almost ran out of the building before having a full on panic attack, but instead, I sat in the bathroom for about five minutes. 

(I did bolt out though at the end of service.)

My last piece was about silence. The silence I’d been feeling, the lack of a path, the inability to give love and grace.

I had some things that happened in my realm of existence over the last two months that I am just now grasping the extent of how it caused me pain. I’m also realizing that for the last portion or so of this season of my life I haven’t given myself space to feel anxious.

You might think, oh that’s great.

But the thing about not giving space for things is that usually they end up coming out in some other way.

I’m not a mom, but I think I understand a piece of motherhood, that your children’s emotions and needs and wants come before yours. I spend my days helping the emotions of the 13-15 3-4 yr olds in my room, and trying to balance all the other emotions at play.

That’s a place I’ve been here before.

So today, I walked.

I walked and took deep breathes and listened to worship music and tried to untangle the anxiety that has built inside me.

I’ve done a lot of soul work in my life. I’ve more hours of therapy than I can calculate, I’ve cried in more foreign countries over coffee with mentors and teachers than I thought I would.

And I forget, in the midst of my speeches of “man up or shut up”, “be who you are”the most popular “just do the damn thing” that feeling anxious, depressed, or emotionally empty doesn’t mean I’m broken. 

There were times where it did mean brokenness. It meant me, curled up on the floor of my Orange County apartment, crying.

It doesn’t mean that right now.

It means living.

And the process of untangling.

I’ve had up and down struggles with anxiety. I have seasons where I forget it exists and season like now where it seems like a prevalent fixture in my life.

I’m not 100% sure why I felt compelled to write this, but I think I wanted you, myself as well, to have more grace for people.

(I cannot tell a lie-that sentence was hard for me to write).

Wait, I guess scratch that. I sort of don’t want to tell you to have more grace for people. I don’t think I’m there yet.

I want you to allow yourself to have more grace for yourself.

I don’t want you to run. I don’t want you to equal grace for yourself for putting your emotions and feelings on others.

I want you to give yourself space to untangle.

I don’t want you to get so tangled that you become incapacitated.

I think anxiety is trying to rob me of some joy in my life. It’s exhausting me at times and attempting to meet me in doorways and keep from coming in.

I’m no where near the bottom of the barrel that I have been, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to do something about it.

It’s like laundry. I’m awful at keeping up with it (heaven forbid when I have to do more than just my laundry), but if I were to keep up with it and hang it up and put it away when I needed too, it wouldn’t be so bad.

I don’t want anxiety to rule my life (or yours), but let’s try to be humans how don’t let it pile up in corners like laundry so that it seeps onto our carpets and pours out of our hampers.

I think I’ve been letting my anxiety do just that, which is why it’s living in very specific places of my life right now.

So, on that note, I’m going to post this blog and figure out ways to do my anxiety laundry for the week.

And lastly, as always, deep breathes to the toes my friends.

We got this.