What My Anxiety Has Been Trying to Tell Me All Along

This post touches on a difficult childhood, past relationships, and anxiety. If you’re in a hard place, please reach out to someone you trust or contact the South African Depression and Anxiety Group at sadag.org.

Anxiety as a working mom has taken on a strange new shape for me lately, one that goes against everything I thought I knew about myself. There’s this urge that hits me almost every day, and it’s a strange one. I’ve always been a homebody. Give me my own space and my own quiet, and I’m content. But since losing my job, there’s this pull to get up and do something, to leave the house, to go somewhere, to see something, to take a picture of it, to prove to myself that the day meant something. And if I don’t listen to it, if I stay in and let the day just happen to me, that’s when it creeps in worse. So I’ve learned to trust it instead of question it. I give the problem its time; I sit with what needs sitting with, and then I move. Because staying still for too long isn’t peace for me right now. It’s the opposite.

That surprised me the first few times it happened, because anxiety is supposed to make you smaller, isn’t it? It’s supposed to keep you in bed, cancel your plans, and close the curtains. And mine always did exactly that. My anxiety has 100% made me a recluse over the years, kept me from socialising, and kept me home, glued to my own safe little space. So when it started doing the opposite, pushing me outward instead of pulling me in, I genuinely didn’t know what to do with that. It’s the first time in my life it’s ever worked this way for me, and I think that’s because for as long as I can remember, my anxiety hasn’t come from the big obvious things. It’s come from people and from not being in control of my own life.

Where This Anxiety as a Working Mom Really Comes From

I’ve had anxiety since I was a child, though I didn’t have the word for it then. Mild panic, a tightness that came and went, and nobody around me thinking to ask why. Looking back now as an adult, I understand it a lot better. What I’ve learned about my anxiety is that it’s never really been about me. It’s been about my environment and about the people in it, whether they meant to or not.

I was the kind of child, and later the kind of woman, who could read a room before I could read anything else. If the mood in the house was good, I was fine. If it wasn’t, I braced. I got so used to feeling for other people’s moods that I stopped noticing I was doing it. I kept everything inside, quiet and polite on the surface, while something else was working away underneath. You could have looked at me on any given day and seen someone smiling, managing, and coping and had no idea that I was unravelling quietly in a way I never let show.

Some of that started with my father. From the time I was twelve, he became a different person toward me and not a gentler one. Controlling, at times unkind, and it stayed that way for a long time. I learned early that love could come with conditions, that keeping the peace meant staying small, and that my safety depended on staying one step ahead of someone else’s mood. When he passed, the relief I felt was something I still can’t fully put into words. But the anxiety didn’t leave with him. It just found a new place to live because somewhere along the way, without meaning to, I’d started choosing relationships with the same shape.

I won’t go into all of it, but I will say this much. My past relationship taught me something I needed to learn, and not gently. Living for someone else’s approval, walking on eggshells, and feeding off someone else’s energy to know if I was safe – that’s not a life I’m interested in living again. So for now, a relationship has no real place in mine. Maybe not forever, maybe not for every man, but I have lived the version where you try to keep two lives balanced, and it cost me myself. I’m not doing that again.

Choosing What Actually Helps

What I’ve chosen instead is to put all of that energy where it actually gives something back. My kids are my foundation. Without them, I feel the pull of anxiety even stronger, which is strange to admit for someone who has always leaned recluse, but it’s true. I feed off their energy the way I once fed off a partner’s mood, except this doesn’t cost me anything. This is where I’ve landed, and for the first time in a long time it feels like a choice I made rather than a role I fell into.

I have written before about the boundaries I had to learn the hard way; choosing my kids over chasing anyone’s approval has honestly been the clearest boundary I have ever set.

That’s part of why the job loss, as hard as it’s been, has started to feel like something else too. For years I let a company be the foundation. Now I get to write a different page, and it looks like more time with my kids, more pictures, more laughing, more actually living instead of surviving the in-between. It’s not about a company anymore. It’s about us.

The things that help me now are small and unglamorous. Journaling, so the noise in my head has somewhere to go instead of just circling. Music, because it shifts something in me without needing anyone’s permission. And getting out of the house, which I think is really just me refusing to shrink the way I used to. For a long time, control wasn’t mine. Now, in the small ordinary choice to get up and go do something with my day, it is.

I have shared how much more journaling has done for my mental health than I had ever expected.

I don’t know if my anxiety will ever fully go quiet. I’m not sure I need it to. What I know now, that I didn’t know then, is that anxiety as a working mom isn’t a flaw. It’s information. It’s telling me who’s safe, what’s worth my energy, and where I actually want to be. I’m still learning to listen to it instead of hiding from it. But for the first time, I like where it’s pointing me.

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