This week, I'm doing a series I'm calling Anxiety 101.

I've been spending the last few weeks trying to learn more about living with anxiety, since mine recently got into the Miracle-Gro and turned my life into Little Shop of Horrors 2: THE PLANT IS INSIDE YOUR MIND, KATIE.

So I thought I'd spend a few days here writing about anxiety because if I tried to write about anything else, it would turn out to be about anxiety. If I tried to write a review of how You've Got Mail has held up over the years, I'd be like, "Biggest question for me: how is it possible that Tom Hanks is totally chill living on a boat with his dad who fucked all his nannies? He must be such a hurt little boy inside. Abandonment is so traumatic at a young age. No wonder he's doing this manipulative email thing with Kathleen Kelly-- he doesn't feel emotionally safe to be honest with her and he must be terrified that she's going to leave him. God, I bet he's hyper-vigilant, too. Side note: is Brinkley a trained emotional support animal?"

Anxiety is the thing on my mind, so I'm leaning in. Anxiety might be on your mind too, because approximately 40 million American adults have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. That's 18% of the population. So. Here goes.

Anxiety 101: It Follows

Living with anxiety is like living inside the movie It Follows.

Full disclosure, I didn't see It Follows, because hi, hello, I have ANXIETY. Think, McFly, think.

Horror movies are guaranteed to ruin my life for a solid month. Also, they'll ruin my kids' lives too because I will simply refuse to leave the house after dark (sorry, Chicken, no gymnastics or chess club for you), and the electric bill after we blaze every light in the house 24/7 could probably have paid for their college or at least their orthodontia.

ARE YOU TELLING ME that you think I should be writing this blog post while wearing sunglasses inside my 77,000-lumen kitchen, after teaching my snaggle-toothed, TMJ-riddled sons on how best to live on $5 a day at the grocery store because their student loans are in the low millions?

Is IT FOLLOWS really worth it?

IS IT???!?!?

Yeah. I didn't think so.

So no, I didn't see It Follows and yeah, you SHOULD feel bad about judging me for it. I accept your apology, though I will never forget your betrayal. Let's move forward together.

It Follows is a horror movie about a slow-moving, relentless supernatural force that appears in the form of a person. That person follows you and nobody else can see them. That entity will continue to appear in the form of random people, invisible to the rest of the world, and it will pursue you until it kills you and nobody else understands why you're freaking out.

It doesn't RUN. It FOLLOWS. It doesn't JUMP OUT AND SCREAM BOO. It FOLLOWS. It just trails behind you. You catch a glimpse of it and your brain throws on the cortisol fire hose and cranks open the dam on Adrenaline Falls. Electricity shoots through your legs, your hands tingle, your vision tunnels. You stop talking in the middle of a sentence. You can't remember words.

Nobody else can see a thing. You are completely alone in the experience of your panic. What you see, feel, taste, smell, and experience exists invisibly, inside your body.

Your friends look where you're looking and see nothing. They're like, "Um, hello? You okay?"

"Do you see that?"

Do they see WHAT?

Do they see that you just saw someone you used to be friends with at the gym and you're experiencing a technicolor, Dolby surround sound, IMAX 3D shame matinee of everything you did wrong when you ended the friendship? Nope, that theater only has one seat in it, friend, and it's all yours.

Do they see that you realized you were hungry and your brain decided that if you weren't going to nourish it with calories, it would fill the energy tanks with liquid panic instead?

Do they see that the sun hit your skin and you realized it's warm for November, too warm, oh God, the ice caps...?

People without anxiety don't SEE that shit. Or maybe they do, but it’s not FOLLOWING them.

"I saw Miranda at the gym today!" For someone without anxiety, that could be the end of the story. I'M TOLD. Who are these warlocks??? "I saw someone I used to be friends with, and then I continued to live my life." Sure, sure, sure, and then you went shopping for jeans and when none of them fit you were like, "I wonder what was wrong with all those JEANS that they didn't fit my magnificent body, let's go get enchiladas and flan"? TEACH ME.

"Whew, I'm hungry!" For someone without anxiety, that sensation can just EXIST. It doesn't FOLLOW. It's not a harbinger of looming apocalypse. It's low blood sugar.

"It's warm today." For someone without anxiety, this observation might be a jumping-off point for choice of cardigan (cotton, not cashmere), not a jumping-off point for an existential meltdown. This person is present, not prey.

The thing you need to understand about the anxious brain, is that by and large, the objects upon which I fixate my anxiety are incidental. The anxious brain is anxious BECAUSE of its anxiety. The thing I fear most is feeling anxious for the rest of my life. The thing I fear most is my fear colonizing my life, waking up every day and having to spend an hour getting back to "okay," or another panic attack arriving unannounced and catastrophic, like an earthquake, or food poisoning on a road trip.

Truly, the thing we have to fear is fear itself. Panic is our Craigslist roomie and we spend our days trying to figure out how to keep that creepy fucker in their room, or how to get the hell out of the house.

Of course we can't. We can't block it in, and we can't run away. Why?

Because IT FOLLOWS.

If you don't experience anxiety, people who do might look like this to you:

That shit makes no sense from the outside, I get it. You might think we're dramatic. You might think we're weak. Just know that what we are experiencing feels like this:

And even if the pool isn’t real, our panic is real. Our feelings are real. Our fear is real.

Put another way, have you ever gotten stuck inside a shirt in a fitting room? Okay, it's THAT. The shirt isn't going to actually kill you, and you know this. You can actually breathe, and you know this. You're not going to die in there, and you know this.

Yet you feel as close to death as a teenage girl who has sex in the first 10 minutes of a horror movie. DEATH IS COMING, you feel it in your bones. If you had a knife you would MURDER that shirt with it in order to escape. You gasp for air and start to thrash around, and your voice gets higher and shakier and you find yourself having to talk yourself through the process of vanquishing a SHIRT that must have been European sizing or something because what the FUCK.

So that's what it's like to live with anxiety: knowing you’re fine and knowing you’re about to die at the same time, while everyone around you is like, “Dude, it’s just a shirt.”

I'll be doing a post a day for the rest of this week about anxiety, but don't worry they will continue to be funny and real, and obviously continue to reference late 90's, early 00's multiplex smash hits -- how is anxiety like time-travel romcom Kate and Leopold? NO IDEA! But let's find out together, shall we?

I'll cover tools that have worked for me, some that A-DEFINITELY have not (spoiler alert: traditional meditation is an express lane to hell, if hell was a mosh pit inside my brain filled with every poor choice I've ever made while my most embarrassing personal failures play 9 encores onstage.)

If someone you love might find this series healing/hilarious/helpful, please share it!

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