I had every well intention to write in this blog during the past several weeks. I had even greater intentions a few weekends ago, while attending an Avett Brothers and Brandi Carlile concert.

Sometimes a moment comes along (hopefully more often than not), when everything around you-sights, sounds, smells, everything—falls into line and you feel perfectly at ease. That’s how I felt at the concert and I remember thinking, though it’s been a couple weeks now, why can’t I always feel like this?

Before the concert started, I acted how I always act in large crowds or big cities. On the walk there I was constantly aware of my surroundings and the people around me. In the building I made note of every exit, route or hiding place. I can’t seem to go anywhere slightly outside of my comfort zone without thinking, at least in the back of my mind, that something terrible is going to happen.

One song in and I forgot all of that. I made a vow to try to feel that content and positive in my everyday life. Of course, those vows are all well and good until something else happens to remind your fears why they’re there in the first place.

I had an entry for the blog all planned, but after I learned what happened a few hours after the concert ended, all the words slipped from my mind and nothing I strung together felt right. I knew a time would come where the anxious world around me would settle just enough for me to make sense of words again.

There are some things that seem too great (too horrible or too beautiful) for human interpretation. When no sound we’ve morphed into speech or markings we’ve made into letters over our time on this earth can grasp the sense of our world in its current state. We either try our best to take it as it is and deliver an unjust statement, or don’t even try, and relay only the things that are possible to tell satisfactorily.

I didn’t even try. For a while, I was extremely quiet and anxious. I felt like I had reverted back to the most extreme parts of my social phobia, which I haven’t experienced since college.

I was paranoid in college, as well as severely socially anxious. I rarely left my dorm room besides going to class and going back to my parent’s house. I had my license, but was too afraid to drive my car, because I trusted neither myself, nor the other motorists on the road. I spent most of my classes trying to fade into the background and writing (book entries, poems, journals, or just nonsense), because it was the only thing that eased my anxiety. When every so often I was called on and attention was forced upon me, I would either murmur “I don’t know,” or just turn red, put my head down, and stay silent until the instructor moved on to somebody else.

I had to have major twenty-minute pep talks with myself just to make a phone call or go to the grocery store. And when I actually made it out to walk somewhere I kept one hand clutched around my phone and the other in my purse, around my pocketknife. I trusted no one.

Life was like this for a very long time. It was just life. Because extremes are only extremes before we become numb to them. When we are surrounded by extreme beauty, after a length of encompassment, it becomes merely landscape. Likewise, when we are surrounded by extreme horror constantly, consistently, it becomes merely life. I didn’t necessarily see the issue in my behavior because that was just the way it was to me. At least, I didn’t see any way it could be different than what it was.

That changed when I met people my last year of college that changed my perspective on a lot of things, the most important of which, at that time in my life, was my perspective on myself. I started taking myself less seriously (when it came to overthinking and things that didn’t actually matter), as well as taking myself more seriously (when it came to aspirations, such as my writing). I also became much more independent and just stopped being so damn scared all the time. I started consistently feeling that ease and contentment, that “Opposite of Loneliness” Marina Keegan talked about in her posthumous book of the same name (more on her book in a future blog post). It was a vital turning point for me.

Since then I’ve lived completely on my own in the middle of nowhere, I now have not one, but two customer service jobs where I am constantly interacting with strangers, and I actually teach a class that involves a lot of jumping, dancing, singing, talking to large groups of people, and in general making a complete fool of myself. And most of the time, I don’t think anything of it anymore.

So basically, reverting was not a fun feeling. And the more weeks that pass, the distance grows between me and my anxiety, and I start to realize more and more how ridiculous I’m being. Yes, the world is a scary place sometimes. That is a current reality. But why should my mind be just as scary a place?