The Overanxious, Anxiety Brain in the Workplace

It’s hard to be professional.

My brain is a hot mess.

After having my son, I learned that I gave him a chromosome disorder. It manifests as autism. I was well in my forties when I learned I was autistic as well.

I also have Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). That means at all times, I’m in fight or flight mode. I have a thousand thoughts running at once, all needing to be addressed. Imagine that feeling you had right before a test that you didn’t study for but was really important. Yeah, it’s like that but all the time.

Let’s sprinkle in my traumatic childhood (parents who are ultra-strict, religious, all about physical punishments, and regretting having children). That’s a whole Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder topic of repeating endless snippets of my life.

Yeah…I just want to stay in bed and avoid people. Every day. If left to my own devices, I’d end up homeless or in prison. I want to win the lottery so that I can keep the covers over my face all day.

I fight the urge to interrupt every conversation with the mental willpower of a starving lion staring at a gazelle.

I’m always tired. My sleeping habits are horrific. I have multiple naps a day and I don’t go to bed until 3 am. Yes, I’ve tried skipping the naps to sync my sleep back to normal. It doesn’t work. The aforementioned GAD either leaves me exhausted or on high alert. I come across as lazy.

Even gentle, constructive criticism makes my brain think it’s being attacked by a hypercritical element. Someone could say they don’t like my car’s shade of grey and I’ll dwell over it for weeks. My boss commented on my laptop’s crappy microphone and I took it personally, despite it being a company-issued device.

I replay on loop the times when I put my foot in my mouth or behaved the wrong way. As a teenager, I worked in a fast-food restaurant. One day a very sweet woman with a speech impediment came in. I couldn’t understand her no matter how hard I tried. Eventually, I grabbed a manager to take her order. My soul aches for how that poor woman must have felt. It must have ruined her day. I know my intentions weren’t bad but still…I feel like an asshole.

I have a Ph.D. in procrastination. I need deadlines and consequences to get anything done. If given three months to do a task, I’ll do it the morning it’s due. I used to think that was a masterful skill for something ill-planned. Now it’s clear that it’s just stressful and leads to poor work. I just don’t care. I care enough to keep a paycheck.

I feel like a little kid playing grownup when I’m at work. This isn’t Imposter Syndrome…I genuinely don’t know how to act or know what I’m doing.

Today, I had to demo and get feedback for a software tool that I administer. I was at my former job for ten years and knew this tool like the back of my hand. Now, I’m using a different version of it, and combined with my lack of company knowledge as the new girl, I struggle with it.

I took an initial stab at a layout and met with one of our teams. The two reps they selected are very nice but very, very serious. It’s intimidating.

In my nervousness, I reverted to old ways. Defensiveness. Interrupting. Incessant babbling about nothing. Promises that I can’t deliver. Not truly listening to a word they said so after the meeting, I didn’t know what to do.

I was interrupting one person so much that her coworker said “hey Jen, can we just let Susan finish her thought?”

Do you remember the little blurb I told about the fast food restaurant incident from thirty years ago? Yeah, this moment will engrain itself in my mind forever.

Toward the end of the call, I apologized for the interruptions by saying how excited I am to roll out this new software tool. I may have apologized a few times while jokingly saying how excited I am to retire the old software no one likes. I repeated, “I appreciate your patience” a few dozen times as well.

I’m stress eating as I type this. My right leg is bouncing and twitching. The back of my mind is running. I feel so stupid. I don’t care if it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme, despite that I’m still new and had minimal interactions with those employees before today so I didn’t leave a very good impression. I’ll always feel dumb around them.

I wish I could be the elegant, graceful woman who is on her A-game.

I’m that woman’s assistant. The kind of chick carrying a few dozen papers that keep falling, a stain on her sweater, and always seeming flustered. I make Anne Hathaway’s character in The Devil Wears Prada look like Joan from Mad Men.

This nervous energy spills into my personal life as well. My inability to stop interrupting means I stay silent during girls’ night because I don’t trust myself to speak at the right time. Like a true autistic, I’ve learned appropriate social behaviors by watching others and pretending to assimilate.

The only exception to everything is when I drink. Except I only allow myself to drink once a week and only in social environments. It’s expensive, has empty calories, I’m usually driving, and I feel like garbage after.

I’m lucky that Jeremy (the deliciously-handsome man I’m dating) is a borderline alcoholic. That gives me an excuse to drink around him. As a lightweight, one glass of wine keeps me even-keeled all night. With the edge taken off, I pretend I’m a fun and sexy woman.

Note the use of the word “pretend”.

We tell our kids “just be yourself”. That’s nonsense and we all know it.

I can’t be my true self. I’d be unemployed and probably die of a vitamin D deficiency from never leaving my house.

At this point in writing, I got so depressed that I crawled into bed and napped for two hours, getting up only because I had to pick up my kids from school.

I have a lot of work to do and I’m ill-equipped to know how to do it. I want someone else to show up, set things up, and then I just have to keep it running. Years ago, I was a team leader out of necessity for almost a year. We were all miserable. I’m not a leader, nor do I care to further other people’s careers or solve their problems. The silver lining is that I learned to never aspire for a management position.

Is working from home better than working in an office for an overactive brain? It’s probably worse for my productivity but better for my introversion and hatred of other humans. If the only time I’m cool and slick is when I drink, perhaps I should start taking up a drinking habit each night.

Something in my life has to change. My body feels like it’s ready to fall apart. My brain feels like an old factory machine overworked beyond its limits, despite having a fraction of the capacity that other machines have. Emotionally…that’s where I need to douse kerosene and light the whole thing on fire.

But I’m too tired and overwhelmed to make the change. Every day feels like survival mode.