Winter was coming.

And predictions were that it was going to blow an epic, frosty load all over the face of Ohio, so I was psychologically prepared. In a way.

As it kept coming to mind Friday and Saturday, my weekend, I comforted myself by telling myself that if my omnipresent anxiety was too high, I could just call off work. I really didn’t want to lose out on the money, but I didn’t want to drive in unsafe conditions or fight off an intense anxiety attack, either.

Sunday came and I awoke and proceeded with my routine, reminding myself all throughout that I only had the option to call off two hours before my shift was scheduled to begin. After that, I was committed to going to work — and to driving home in the snowstorm.

And I kept telling myself to just endure the plaguing fear. Running away, avoiding it, that bullshit just feeds it strength. So just face it, endure it, manage it, plow yourself through it.

That last part, likely literally.

I fought with myself until it was too late, passed the two-hour limit, and my fate was sealed. I knew I’d have to deal with the drive home that night. That’s when the anxiety I felt infecting me as soon as I woke up achieved a new level of intensity. Observing this in myself, I got rather pissed off.

It kept hitting me how stupid this was, how utterly nonsensical. The anxiety I was destined to have flooding me tonight would be bad enough, why was I compounding it with anxiety over my coming anxiety? If “fear is the mindkiller,” I thought to myself, than fear of fear is overkill.

So as I often do when somethings bothering me, I wrote about it on the word processor app on my phone. How anxiety attacks felt to me. How I felt so anxious about my anxiety attacks. How I felt about how anxious I felt over my anxiety attacks.

Mouth as dry as the Sahara, skin laminated in cold sweat. Throat as narrow as a straw with a massive lump inside you can’t swallow down. Eyeballs stuck on high-beams. Your entire body, feeling like a fist so tense the knuckles are white and your fingernails are digging into your bloody, fucking palm.

Teeth clenched like a vice. Movements jerky, breathing choppy, voice flailing and failing like its regressed back to puberty.

I boldly pronounced that anxiety sucked. How fear over a present circumstance was plenty enough, and how unnecessary it felt for my mind to subject me to additional torture by anticipating that anxiety and delivering nauseous, psychic gunshots of pre-anxiety anxiety.

Yes, I confessed, I’ll feel like I’m dying as I drive home tonight from work in the midst of a snow storm, where the relentless sky dandruff will obscure my vision and the frosty, white death blanketing the ground will render me incapable of discerning where the road begins and ends, but does it have to ruin my entire day?

I hemmed and hawed, but ultimately posted it on social media. I got an all-around sympathetic response, and in a way it felt good. That people got it, even understood it through personal experience.

All throughout the night at work, though, I kept coming back to it in my mind and feeling that what I wrote and displayed to the world wide webworks just made me look weak, pathetic, childish, unmasculine, and attention-seeking, and that in turn fed my self-loathing. At the same time I realized that if the responses had not been kind, supportive, and sympathetic but rather brutal, mocking, and downgrading, I would have felt even worse.

This reinforced my suspicion that nothing can ever satisfy me. And that, in turn, fed my self-loathing, who had hardly had time to digest its former feast.

So closing time came. The filthy, icy, sky jism had already rained down several coats across everything in sight by that time, a sight that was in part obscured by the relentless snow that continued to fall. I warmed up the truck, brushed it off, clocked out, put it in four-wheel-drive, got gas, beer and cigarettes at the Circle K, and proceeded down that long, dark road towards my one-bedroom apartment.

My dreaded journey.

Quite often when I’m wrong, I’m rather embarrassed about it, but I accept it as necessary suffering given my desire to grow my body of knowledge, to increase my overall understanding. Quite often when I’m proven right, I’m disappointed and pissed off.

Nothing can ever satisfy me.

I was right. The drive was horrid. My speed rarely climbed above 30 miles per hour, never above 40. Gripping the steering wheel so fucking tight my fingertips went numb. Forehead way too close to the windshield as my unblinking eyes fought to maintain concentration on the road.

Trying to relax my breathing. Fighting back against, talking back to the violent mob of automatic negative thoughts.

Striving to see through the slush that my shitty windshield wipers increasingly failed to wipe away.

And finally parking in what I could ascertain by the unblanketed landmarks was my usual parking space, and then carefully making my way across the winter tundra to the security door of my apartment complex.

Once inside, I responded to all the comments I’d recieved on social media. Then I drank and smoked and smoked myself out of the tension that may have otherwise imprisoned me all night long and on into the early morning.

I awoke happy that it was all finally over, as anxiety is so exhausting and time-consuming. If only I could harness the energy expended in my states of anxiety, I truly believe I could get this civilization off its reliance on fossil fuels, I swear.

From beyond my third-story window, I could hear the whirring of angry tires spinning against snow, vehicles aggressively striving to free themselves of the wintery graves Old Man Winter had fashioned for them the evening before. That dick. Parting the curtains, I looked outside and below and knew I’d have to get out there early to excavate the truck.

It was a pain in the ass, but I finally brushed off the truck sufficiently and, after some four-wheel, drive-and-reverse struggling, managed to free the Tacoma. The parking lot was barely plowed, which was also the case with the road I live on, though I had anticipated both. It’s just a left onto that road and then a left at the intersection, though, which should be plowed and cleared by now.

In my anxious pessimism, even I had confidence in this the previous evening, confidence that was reinforced by my coworkers, who freely offered up the same prediction.

“At least by tomorrow,” Jerry had said to me, “the roads will be clear.”

The roads? They were not clear.

It was akin to the terror of the former evening, only with daylight. I arrived at work, where the parking lot was also not plowed, and planted myself next to two vehicles I knew to be Kelly’s, the store manager, and Marcy’s, one of the assistant managers. These were the only two vehicles in the lot.

I tried to relax for about ten minutes, after which I planned to do my usual: enter the doors, go to the restroom, and stare at the time clock for a few minutes before I clocked in and my miserable Monday shift began.

At least by the time I leave, I told myself, the roads should be cleared.

I got to the doors of the building. They were locked. This isn’t too unusual. Since the pandemic, we frequently close lobby due to being short-staffed. I pounded on the doors for what seemed like forever before Marcy answered, and she did so with that smile that prepared me for news that I would not like that would subsequently be coming out of her mouth in that sarcastically sweet voice. I was not to be disappointed in this respect.

“Don’t be mad,” she said, hanging out the doorway, “but we’re closed.”

Wait, what?

“Everybody on night shift called off except the new guy.”

You didn’t think to tell me?

“I figured you’d call off like everybody else,” she said, “because of the snow.”

So I forced myself to come here despite my agonizing fears and I didn’t fucking have to? And now I have to turn around and do it all again?

Fuck. Fuckity-fuck.

So, yes, I had to endure the drive again, though in reverse this time. And the roads were slightly better. I decided to stop and get beer. And then, since there were still no cleared parking spaces, I had to plant the Tacoma right back into its former grave of death.

So I’m home now. On a fast food snow day. Drinking beer, smoking weed, writing all the fuck about it. Still kind of frustrated.

Really, dude: nothing will ever satisfy me.