Hack Off Anxiety #1: Forget The Past

A fair number of articles on my blog will revolve around personal experiences, including the most recent life-changing struggle I underwent over 2023: Anxiety. My aim with this series, which has been named “Hack Off Anxiety”, is to provide an accessible, real, and personable insight into my struggles with anxiety in bits and pieces; if this series can help make even one person’s life happier, it will be fully worth it. Each article typically includes an active step that one may take in order to make things better. Keep in mind that I am not a medical professional and none of the words I say should be taken as medical advice but rather as anecdotal lessons that have helped me.

My childhood was horrible, I recall myself telling my therapist one week. A month later I told him it was a normal experience. A few weeks later I told him it was sheltered and comfortable. Mixed messaging at its finest.

Am I a liar? No more than your average person, I suppose. What this is more about is a case of the forget-me’s, a persistent affliction of the human condition. Which leads me to my present thesis: the past is fiction, a mere caricature of what was once real, one riddled with plot-holes and mistakes and false insertions and erasures, as unreliable as one’s thoughts after getting drunk. Worse, the past shrouds its fibs underneath a veneer of reality, a sin not committed by alcoholic ruminations.

What do we do with such deception? Discard it utterly into the abyss of oblivion. Distill from it what remains of…