An Anxious Idiot


This post was somehow lingering and here I was surfing the net! Was I getting into the bad habit of postponing a job? I feared for a moment. Even if I was, it wouldn’t really be the case, I was sure. I know how to tighten screws and I guess, everyone does. Everybody knows freedom is allowed up to a point. Great are the ones who don’t reach that point. Still those who reach it but pull up their socks aren’t that bad, are they?
Crossing that point probably defines anxiety and it starts taking its toll; stress, strain, depression, frustration, despair, give it any name. Analyses of these words would unfold myriad psychological shades and symptoms. However, for the common people, me included, it means the same. The person who isn’t happy is sad, as simple as that.
Though it could be put in simple terms in common man’s language, ‘stress’, in general, seems complicated. Could it be simple? A headline of a New York Times column, which arrested my attention, indicated it could be. An Anxious Idiot… it said. Nobody would publicly admit that one is an idiot. But every stressed person would think it’s addressing him/her.
At the very beginning of the column, the writer quotes her conversation with her brother.
“I am very depressed and frustrated. I can hardly smile. I know what I am doing is not right. I am well aware what should I do but somehow I am refusing to do…..” This is what an annoyed sister told her brother and he coolly replied, “You…an anxious idiot.” The ‘enlightened’ sister not only wrote an entire column around her brother’s four-word reply but also fond a solution for herself after she accepted she was being idiotic.
That ‘idiot’ writer falls into the category of people who have crossed the point where they could pull up their socks. Idiocy, particularly here, has got nothing to do with intellect. It purely indicates one’s inability to recover just in the nick of time. In most cases of stress, which are escalating today, it’s widely observed that they know what needs to be done and that not acting in time leads to a serious problem. To cut a long story short, they are individuals who know the theory but fail to put it in practice. They are ‘idiots’ because they allow stress to get the better of them first and later seek help to get de-stressed…
A bundle of nerves, a nervous wreck or an idiot, call anything, gets more and more distressed in the attempt of de-stressing. Our columnist got into the trap but luckily she could free herself.
An aside. Soon after reading the column, I received a call from a close friend. “I am nervous and worried. I have to conduct stress-management workshop single-handedly.”
“You an anxious idiot..,” I replied.
Hope she wears her thinking cap like the ‘idiot’ columnist did!
-KanChan



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