When the Body Shakes: A Truth About Anxiety and Self-Forgiveness

 This month, I want to explore how anxiety affects our decision-making. I believe it's essential to start with a clear understanding: anxiety is an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like increased heart rate or blood pressure. It's the body's natural response to stress, serving as an alarm system that helps you prepare for perceived danger.

By now, you know a lot about my personal journey. While I won't go into every detail out of respect for the love of my life—my daughter—I must say that I've experienced a great deal of anxiety in recent years: after giving birth, during my marriage, and now. I recognize that accepting accountability for my feelings doesn't make the pain any less real.

Looking back, I can see how my sense of safety left with my marriage. It's been about three years now, and still, not a single day passes where I don't have intrusive thoughts. Anxiety quickly kicks in. There have been many days where I have felt overwhelmed by it.

As a clinical social worker, one of the first and most important things you learn after giving a patient a diagnosis is to describe the symptoms, particularly the physical ones. In my experience, describing the physical symptoms helps to normalize the internal question, "Am I crazy?" Talking openly about physical symptoms—like the two I suffer from, high blood pressure (yes, it's out there now) and shaking—can be deeply debilitating. The shaking is how my brain responds to anxiety; my body has been physically signaling distress.

The Everyday Battle

Every single day, it is an exhausting effort to control my thought process. I often aim to apply the same techniques I encourage my clients to use. And yet, I keep finding myself in vulnerable situations, overthinking, and at times questioning my life choices. It's one thing to deal with these patterns in my mind and quite another to face this same vulnerability in real-life situations.

Getting back into dating meant stepping outside my comfort zone and my "bubble," which has likely triggered a return of my anxiety and a diminished sense of safety. Analyzing these new experiences made one thing clear: I was easily mistaking validation for genuine connection. I have to remind myself that not everyone who enters my life belongs there forever; some people must leave, and the sooner they do, the better.

I've also learned a great deal about anxiety: I've realized that it is fundamentally a desperate manifestation of my deep need for predictability and control. I construct rigid rules and frantic projections in my mind, seeking safety from the terrifying discomfort of uncertainty. I now understand that this drive for control is simply a defense mechanism—a psychological "safety blanket" that often traps me rather than protecting me.

Writing this, I’ve internalized a key, difficult lesson: The path out of anxiety is not through elimination or greater control, but through the courage of vulnerability and building resilience. I see that when I overthink or desperately try to predict an outcome, I'm not being strategic; I'm engaging in the very behavior that fuels my anxiety. The choice, I now know, is to practice courage over comfort—to stop trying to engineer safety and instead lean into the messy, uncertain truth of my current life. This means accepting that making decisions from a place of fear or loneliness is precisely what I need to stop doing.

A New Season, A New Choice

As another season is approaching, I want to share a key takeaway: We need to be careful who we let into our lives. We must not allow loneliness, sadness, or intense anxiety to dictate who we become, whether as women or as individuals. Let's practice self-forgiveness for the times we've let those emotions make decisions for us. It is absolutely okay to make mistakes; it's okay if we don't always live by our own perfect words.

When the anxiety kicks in and I start to question everything, I remind myself that when the noise of external expectations and fear gets too loud, my true identity is still there. I care a lot—sometimes too much, and I truly hate feeling vulnerable. While I'm working on it and know how important it is to be vulnerable, it's still a fight. I keep reminding myself that it's okay when things don't work out the way I expect and plan.

I also have to grant myself permission to pause, to cry, and to acknowledge that "This part of my life truly hurts." That pain is real, but I must remind myself not to unpack and live there. The current chaos is just a chapter—not the whole story, and certainly not my final ending. I am allowed to keep breathing and keep going.

Right now, I may not be feeling safe, but I hope I will get there. I am working hard on regaining power over my life. This process of radical self-disclosure, while frightening, has been incredibly cathartic and healing for me. This is certainly one of the most difficult posts I have written so far, but I'm truly thankful for the support.

As I always say, let's reinvent and move forward from a place of compassion and kindness—the same we so readily offer others. The journey of healing isn't linear, but by being mindful of our anxiety and practicing self-forgiveness, we can make decisions that lead us to a healthier and more whole version of ourselves.