is this hot sauce free?
"Would you like me to bring you some hot sauce?"
"Um... sure!"
And so it began. Little did I know that this seemingly innocuous decision would be the invitation for yet another unwanted visit from my old friend Anxiety.
After placing my order, I sat back and watched the softly lapping waves coming in from the Caribbean Sea. There was a pleasant background hum of idle conversation -- mostly tourists, which is understandable given this restaurant's waterfront location on the lovely island of Aruba. In this moment, my heart was smiling and my soul was at peace.
But, "like a tank of gas and a radio song; any good thing, it don't last long".
Before long, the waitress brought over my dinner -- white fish with a smidge each of macaroni salad, pan bati, rice, and a fried plantain. And of course, the hot sauce.
Oh boy.
This is some fancy hot sauce. I was expecting a bottle of Tapatio or similar. But instead I got two small jars, one with pink picked onions, and one with papaya and scotch bonnet. These jars contained way more than any reasonable person could consume in a single sitting, and the quality of the lids' seals suggested this was the sort of item you take home with you after the meal.
Wait. Is this hot sauce free? Oof. Enter Anxiety.
Intellectually, this really was no big deal whatsoever. If only the rest of my brain could follow the part that generates rational logic.
Is this some souvenir hot sauce? Am I going to get roped into shelling out like 16 bucks for this? This vacation has already done a number on my bank account. Should I ask if this is complementary before I open the jars? If I ask, will that make me look like a fool? Or worse, a miser? Am I overthinking this? (Yes.)
After some tense internal dialog, I decided I would just roll with this one. In the grand scheme of things, paying for some overpriced souvenir hot sauce isn't going to have a big impact on my life. It's time to enjoy this meal by the sea.
I wish I could say I enjoyed the rest of my dinner in peace. But in reality, Anxiety was never far away.
Explaining in detail what anxiety feels like is a Story For Another Time, but for now, when I say "anxiety", I mean this tense, stressful, hand-trembling feeling that you're in danger. And you need to fight, flight, or freeze. And you need to do it now. And I mean NOW.
I've come a long way in developing my relationship with Anxiety. I'm not sure it will ever truly leave me alone, just like one will never truly escape fear or shame or sadness or any other "undesirable" emotion that make up the human experience. However, I've gotten way better at handling these feelings when they do come.
But this isn't my final form.
I have big plans for my life, and they involve spending lots of time with people and feelings I actually want to be with. And I've found that writing down thoughts is an excellent way to process said thoughts. Even if that writing is like this post, snapshotting an experience to give me the opportunity to revisit it later. And maybe to vent, just a little, about my silly brain that's ostensibly trying to keep me safe, but is doing more harm than good, worrying about something that literally does not matter.
And so, I'm starting a new blog. I've been writing on Bear Blog for a bit over a year now, and I'll probably still post over on that other blog. But I wanted something that was a little closer to anonymous. Something where I could explore thoughts that pass me by, with a little less worry about them being connected to my Internet Identity.
I think that just because you have a thought, it doesn't mean you automatically believe that thought. But the Internet doesn't usually allow you to write down thoughts without giving you labels, whether or not you agree with those labels, and whether or not you wanted those labels in the first place.
Because my other blog was a bit more connected to my real life identity, between the possibility of the aforementioned labels and a (perhaps misguided) self-imposed quality threshold, it did prevent me from writing the things I wanted to write about.
That said, the fact that I'll be posting these thoughts on the Internet in a place where other humans may read them will ensure that they'll still be above some threshold of quality.
So while I am writing these for myself, I'm also writing them for you!
I hope we both walk away a little more wise.
Oh! And when I received the bill, I discovered the hot sauce was complimentary!
To celebrate, here's a photo I took of the sunset just steps away from where I would end up worrying about something I ultimately never should have worried about.
