My mom told me yesterday that she has anxiety. “I’ve never felt this way before,” she told me. She made it sound like the world’s ending but really, I think she just need to stop over-reacting and calm down.

I’ve been told everyone has anxiety from time to time and that fear can be mistaken for anxiety. Being anxious and fearful are all just part of the normal human experience, though some people have it worse than others. What my mom is going through, from the way she described is not anxiety but FOMO, as I’ve described in a post I wrote in March about the similar phenomenon I went through back in March. She’s fearing about missing out on life, all the time she’ll have after retirement, and how she’ll fill those seconds, minutes, and hours. “What am I supposed to do?” She said, “I can’t just travel non-stop.”

“Get a hobby,” I replied, “find something you like to do. Get a part-time job.” She answered no to all three and frankly, that was all the ideas I have, which brings me to the reason for this post.

I got laughed at and ridiculed when I told her I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, she didn’t believe me then nor did she support me. In fact, she even made my anxiety worse at times, especially because I can’t talk to her about any of it without her saying, “You shouldn’t feel anxious,” or “there shouldn’t be any reasons you should feel anxious,” and then proceed to list all the things she’s provided for me. Now, she’s just beginning to suffer from a temporary bout of fear and anxiety and she’s expecting me to find a miracle cure for her? My relationship with her is feeling more and more one-sided by the day.

The way she described it, it’s nothing like what I go through each day. My anxiety is something that plagues me even in my sleep. My brain is constantly playing me worse-case scenarios like it’s the only channel on a TV. This has gone on for many years but it tends to get worse in stressful times and there are plenty of times living under the same roof as my mom. The only way I’ve been able to silence the voice in my head, even temporarily, has been to do what I love – gardening and photography. Those two activities seem to keep the voice at bay.

In the end, I recommended ashwagandha, which never worked for me. Perhaps, it’s because I’m never able to de-stress in my current environment. Lo and behold, she informed me a few hours later that she’s feeling a lot calmer.