Digging through storage boxes the other day, I found old, 20-plus-year-old copies of Time Magazine, Newsweek, Mother Jones and a host of others. There had to be four years of them, well over 200 volumes.
And so I was reminded — again — of all the fear I used to carry around.
As I’ve written before, fear and anxiety were byproducts of my particular brand of OCD, just like my addictions were a byproduct.
The fear meant a lot of things. Working myself into a stupor over the safety of my wife and children. An obsession with cleanliness, which was interesting since depression always meant my personal hygiene took a dive.
It also meant a fear of world events. When that Nostradamus movie “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow” came out on HBO in the early 1980s, I was terrified by the “future” scenes, especially the one where New York and Paris are destroyed in nuclear attacks.
Later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, I thought the scene from above was playing out and it left me in a huge depression, one where I stayed in my basement with the lights off.
Similar emotions took hold on Sept. 11, 2001. Of course, those emotions took hold on everyone that day.
Most recently, in 2005, I had a long panic streak over the bird flu in Asia, which was predicted to be the next great pandemic, as deadly as the one in 1918-19.
I would read every magazine and every website tracking all these world events as if my personal safety depended on it. If a hurricane was spinning in the Atlantic, I would watch with deepening worry as it edged closer to the U.S.
When did all this stop? It’s hard to pin an exact date or year on it.
I only know it stopped.
One day the anxiety attacks stopped. Then I started to crave all the experiences I once feared. Not the terror attacks, plane crashes and pandemics, mind you, but the traveling, the public speaking and more intensified writing. One day I started craving those things with the same vigor with which I craved all the junk I polluted myself with.
Therapy — years of it — and Prozac definitely played a role. So did my deepening Faith.
Whatever it was, I’m glad it happened.