I often find that my body is just on autopilot. I don’t even know why I’m doing what I’m doing.
I find myself doing that sometimes in quiet moments. I end up puttering around the kitchen, tidying. Cleaning is like my default anxiety remedy or way to control my environment. It might’ve been ingrained in me since I was a child, when I remember hearing remarks like:
“The only reason why you have children is so they can do the dishes.”
“Saturday mornings are for cleaning the bathrooms-and they have to be done the right way.”
“Make sure you wipe the kitchen table in a certain way, so the sponge marks go with the wood grain of the table.”
I’ve been working on this more intently in the past few months, and I was aware of myself enough to know that my behavior was avoiding something, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint what. Because in my history, you lock everything up in terms of how you’re feeling, and you just perform. I was, in the vein of Lady Macbeth (“Out, damned spot; out, I say”), I tried to scrub the invisible mess off my brain.
So I sat down and made myself be still, because there was no hurry, and the dishes were gonna get dirty again anyway.
I found that I couldn’t stop jiggling my leg.
Deep breaths were not helping.
Meditations were not helping.
So I was trying to zero in on where the pinpoint of my anxiety was stemming from.
I find that imagery is very calming, and I was getting flashes of myself as a little girl, seeing myself sitting on my bed reading, escaping into fiction, keeping an eye on the door, and an ear out for the footsteps. but knowing that every minute was a borrowed quiet minute. My room was messy, and when I finally heard that trash bag open, there was that familiar drop in my stomach. That was as far as I could get in the imagery, which I feel like is a breakthrough.
I was able to have my adult self sit with eight-year-old Caroline, in her hand-sewn clothes, her large Coke-bottle glasses, the gaps where her baby teeth fell out, with large adult teeth coming in (a foreshadowing of braces needed in her near future), and hair that was blow-dried straight, which is an almost perfect metaphor of polishing her wildness into something more acceptable. And so, 37-year-old Caroline, with her frizzy curly hair, in my mind, was sitting next to little Caroline—and that was as far as I got.
Driving later that day, I could feel the residual aftershocks of that earlier anxious moment. And I don’t know why I was anxious. I think it was a perceived “If I’m not productive, then I’m worthless.” And yet, nothing in my current state would ever suggest that has any truth to it. It’s purely from my instructional history.
But reflecting upon that, more imagery came to mind ( I am a visual metaphor girl, if you haven’t picked up on that already. I think the frequency count might be at four or five in terms of metaphors). That ripple- where did it lead?
It’s as if I’m in a kayak on a clear blue bay, and there are ripples coming toward me on an otherwise calm and peaceful sunny day. I picture myself sitting on that crystal water, sensing ripples coming from an unknown source, and I peer down to look deeper
Underneath the water, there’s a submarine- that was the source of the ripples. I imagine that inside the submarine is a navigation room filled with maps, plans, analytics, and graphs, all housed within a submarine that's full of steampunk stovepipes. And who would be operating such a submarine of anxiety but the chaos goblins?
They look like felted little Muppets from Fraggle Rock crossed with the Mucinex monsters. Gangly and globular creatures who are running around, yanking levers and making honking noises and setting off engines and steam pipes, shouting things like:
“You should have said that on the phone!”
“Remember what you did in fifth grade? How embarrassing.”
“Let’s go back to square one! Rehearse that”
They pull out charts, maps, analytics, who knows from where. They're trying to reverse-engineer everything, predict the future, and plan every outcome.
One of them insists on rehearsing the same scenario again with a different tone. And another one in the corner is just spinning in circles with a compass, muttering about productivity. They’re all just sitting in the submarine with honking doodads and engines firing.
But here's the thing: they don’t trust the tides.
They don’t believe I’ll be okay if I just sit still and float.
And my true self is just sitting in that kayak, on top of the clear water, just looking down. And this image makes me giggle. And that’s what I’m finding is helping dispel that nervous anxiety. Sure, I could also be doing some somatic work, and I’d like to learn more about that: shaking it out, dancing, clenching and releasing, etc., but laughing about these anxiety chaos goblins in the submarine seems to do the trick. And I might roll with that for a while.
I love listening to the
podcast with Paige DeSorbo and Hannah Berner, and they often talk about their mental health. They talk about anxiety, and during one of their episodes, Hannah was saying how she learned a trick: if she has an anxious thought or something that’s kind of intrusive, she says something like, “Oh! Brain fart.” And that makes her giggle. Then the anxiety kinda goes poof, disappears.And Paige responded that she had seen a TikTok once, where if you whisper your name in your head and then yell your name in your head, it shows how much control you actually have over your thoughts. And that stuck with me, too-because we think, Oh, we have to medicate ourselves, we have anxiety, we have to control it from the outside. But what if the power actually comes from within?
Now, I’m not discounting anxiety medication. I’m on some myself, and I think it’s necessary to be able to cut through the static and actually see what we’re dealing with. But these thoughts do become behaviors beneath the skin, because they are a controlling mechanism that has an impact on the outside world. And so, if we can rewire that, then I think we can get ahead of that anxiety.
And so, by picturing my true self in a kayak on top of a very clear lake, and these chaos goblins in a submarine underneath, causing ripples because they don’t have any trust in the tides or the current, and just letting me be… it makes me giggle. And it’s giving me something to put in a box instead, and keep it contained. It helps me return to myself and gives me something concrete to hold onto when meditating or when redirecting my intrusive, anxious thoughts.
And I’m surprised at how fast laughter works. To bring in a whole other metaphor, it reminds me of the Monsters Inc. movie, when they ultimately found out (spoiler alert): laughter was much more powerful and had more energy than fear.
And I think that’s kind of true here. If you can laugh about it, you can diffuse the situation much more quickly.
So I’m going to let you know how this works. I still may feel like a duck paddling on the water myself… but I will try to stay in that kayak to observe.
I have been tracking my moods using a Mama Mood Grid that I’ve designed, similar to what’s used in a bullet journal, and so I think I’d like to call this an intervention. And I will mark it on my grid. Let’s see if this helps my anxiety decrease, and if I can have more blue and green days coming ahead.
I still might feel like a duck paddling underneath, but at least now I know where the ripples come from.
For now, I know what fear and anxiety look like.
They look like a submarine full of goblins who are trying really hard to run the show.
And I’m not firing them.
But I’m not letting them steer anymore either.
If you’re reading this and thinking “Wait… I have goblins too”, then congrats! You’re not alone.
Anxiety shows up in metaphors, behavior chains, and body cues.
Sometimes what helps is finding a new image, one that makes you laugh instead of freeze.
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