Picture a box of brand new, freshly opened Crayola crayons. A 120 pack, with all the colors sharpened and neatly lined up. See the various shades and colors, standing straight and tall in their coordinated rows. Smell the new crayon smell.
Look at all the choices available to you, all the shades of all the colors. You have your standard red, yellow, green, and blue. But you also have burnt sienna, atomic tangerine, laser lemon, purple pizzazz, and Caribbean green. In front of you are all the colors and a blank coloring sheet, ready to be filled with the colors of the rainbow.
Now imagine someone stepping in and picking up the box of crayons. They pick out one crayon, the gray one, and hand it to you. That’s all you get. All those fresh beautiful colors, and all you can use is gray.
That’s what anxiety does to you.
You have a full range of emotions, ready and waiting to help you experience, understand, and process the world. You have your standard happy, sad, angry, and scared. But you also have delighted, comforted, overwhelmed, furious, lonely, jealous, and perplexed.
When you are dealing with anxiety, it’s like all those feelings are taken from you, and you are left with just one feeling to experience, understand, and process with. Everything becomes filtered through just that one feeling. Everything becomes anxiety.
Say you get a new job. Your normal self would feel a broad range of emotions. Pride that you got the offer. Sadness about leaving valued colleagues and clients. Excitement about new opportunities. Fear of change and transition. But when you are dealing with anxiety, your emotional response is boiled down to just one experience: anxiety. There are probably hundreds of variations of the anxiety, different thoughts and fears and dread and foreboding. But it’s all just that one emotion.
Everything becomes anxiety, and suddenly gray is the only color you have to color your world.
It’s important to note that anxiety can be both an emotion and also a clinical diagnosis. The emotion of anxiety is a relative of fear, while the clinical diagnosis of an anxiety disorder is more severe, pervasive, and debilitating. Both the emotion of anxiety and clinical levels of anxiety can take away your crayons and leave you with gray.
Anxiety is a visitor that shows up at my doorstep every so often. And one of my first signs that it’s back is that I realize I’ve traded in my 120 count box of feelings for a 16 count, and in my darkest seasons, just one. When I start responding to everything with fear or worry, no matter how good or bad or big or small, I know that I am dealing with anxiety.
If you find yourself in this space, it’s a good indication that it’s time to take some action. Ask for help. Talk to people you love and trust. Find a therapist to help you battle the anxiety.
It’s also important to take some time and space to look beneath the anxiety. Yes, you are anxious about the new job, but what else? Try to find the other colors beneath the gray.
I promise you that they are there. They are not gone forever, and they are even at work beneath the surface, outside of your awareness. Most of the time if you look carefully, you can find them.
Your emotional life was meant to be one of depth, color, and variation. You were given a full box of colors to help you experience, understand, and make sense of the world. Fight for those colors, and don’t let anyone or anything leave you with only gray.