We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About Nobody Cares: Essays
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Nobody CaresEssaysBy Anne T. DonahueECW PRESSCopyright © 2018 Anne T. DonahueAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-77041-423-5ContentsIntroduction, Anxiety, You Lying Bitch, In Case of Emergency, I'll Read Your Cards, Near, Far, Wherever You Are, Work, Bitch, Failing Upwards, Things I Have Not Failed (But Quit Proudly), "Why Don't You Drink?", It's Called Fashion, Look It Up, Just Do What I Say, Friendship Mistakes I Have Made (So You Don't Have To), But, for the Record: I Am Not Fun, The Least Interesting Thing, While in the Awful, That Guy, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love One Direction, Icebreakers: A Guide to Making a Real Splash at a Party, An Anne for All Seasons, Burn It Down, Get to Work, It Will Never Feel This Bad Again, Hometown Glory, Acknowledgments, About the Author, Copyright, CHAPTER 1Anxiety, You Lying BitchSome are born anxious, some achieve anxiety, and some have anxiety thrust upon them. I am lucky enough to have been blessed with all three.Ten years ago, I would have never admitted this essential truth about me. When I began my romance with anxiety, I thought it was all a phase; that stress wouldn't manifest itself in my life (or in my stomach) forever and that, like all youthful dalliances, I would grow out of it — in the same way I grew out of wanting to be Lauren Conrad or marry Benedict Cumberbatch.With every anxiety attack or anxiety-induced stomach cramp or inability to digest a meal properly, I told myself that it would all get better. That I could "beat" it by self-medicating with booze and sleep aids, or by denying it existed entirely, or by making myself small enough that it might miss me. Because anxiety is a liar, it convinced me that I was the only one it ever visited. It'd whisper its toxic nonsense to me when I was too stressed to question my relentless mental narrative. It kept me pinned down by quietly insisting that if I ever opened up about it, I'd be all alone.There were certainly signs that anxiety would become A Thing as I grew up: I cried every day in first grade because I missed my mom. I couldn't stay overnight at a friend's without assuming that something bad would happen to my parents unless I was home. I couldn't fall asleep unless my mom promised there'd be no burglars or fires and that she'd check on me every ten minutes "just in case." In middle school, I developed an irrational fear of tornadoes (despite never having seen one) that morphed into a teen and twentysomething fear of food poisoning. (I wouldn't eat meat at a restaurant, ever.) And then I failed a math class, and anxiety spiraled me into a full-on existential crisis.When I think about that math-defined summer, almost every moment is defined by what I can now identify as severe anxiety: by all- consuming destructive monologues and all-encompassing worries and refusals to acknowledge that what I was feeling wasn't the product of me being a failure, but of my brain being a liar. I'd get anxious about going out, about eating, about having to pretend I was the same person I'd been a few months prior. I'd curl up on my bed on weekends instead of going out, crying because I was afraid to eat dinner since I hadn't been able to digest anything properly in weeks. I'd sob in front of repeated screenings of Sense and Sensibility, unable to articulate to my parents what was happening to me or why I was feeling the way I was. And, because anxiety spreads as well as it lies, it began manifesting about work, about friends' birthdays, about my own birthday, about ordering from a restaurant menu.Anxiety followed me when I changed jobs, during my first year of university, and throughout the following autumn and winter. It hung around when I started to drink more, when I started to drink less, and when I got sober once and for all and was forced to process life without numbness. It would hover over me for days before finally swooping in to convince me that I was failing,
