Steven Hawking, My Anxiety, And Me

Vote. Go vote. I'm not, I'm just starting with please go vote. It is Tuesday, November 3rd. Hello, Emily. It is Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026, if you're watching this live. And so I'm going to encourage you to vote. If it's after that, I hope you are enjoying the fruits of your votes, whatever they happen to be. But as someone who dedicated and dedicates much of my adult life to government and local government, I'm really imploring you to go vote. I'm not telling you who to vote for, honest to goodness.

Just please go vote. I voted. My sticker is in the other room. I should have put it on so you could all see my I voted sticker and how proud I am to have voted today. I get a little choked up whenever I go into the ballot box. So please go vote. Please go vote. And I titled this, Stephen Hawking, My Anxiety and Me, which I am guessing, for at least some people, would be an intriguing kind of, what on earth is she talking about? Well, I'm gonna tell you. That's why we're here together. I'm gonna tell you why that was.

Years ago, years ago, I read a book, and then I reread it a couple years ago about a man who was having conversations with his higher power. He's having a conversation with his higher power. And they're talking about coming to earth as a spirit or a soul and any decisions you make about your life beforehand. I am not here to preach theology to you. I'm just trying to give you the background. So they were talking about Stephen Hawking and how brilliant he was and also that he had a condition that left him using a wheelchair and using a keyboard to talk.

And he had this brilliant mind. And the one, the character in the book was saying, oh, and just imagine if he had not had that condition, if he had not had to use a wheelchair, if he had not had to use this keyboard to type. And this version of his higher power basically responds to him and says, think about all that he did. Think about all that he did. And maybe it wasn't, first of all, the ableism in that, right? But maybe it wasn't tragic for him to be able to use his mind so fully and to change the world with his ideas.

And I think about that passage A lot. Now, I have my own thoughts about it, which is what I'm going to talk a little bit about it today, because I had this realization earlier this week. I am in a phase where my anxiety is a little higher. I do an anxiety score every day at the end of the day, like 1 through 10, where was my anxiety today? I also say where was my zest today? How zesty was I today? And I also do how much of A freeze state was I in today? It does not take long. I do not feel bad about it, but it helps me track over time what's going on.

And you know, I've had some pretty, my freeze days have been pretty low. My anxiety days have been pretty high. Often what'll happen is my experience of anxiety will go way down if my freeze response goes way up because at that point I am just numb and whatever. And so those two things are intertwined, but I track them separately. Pro tip, right? Just at the end of the day, I could show you. I have a little monthly calendar thing. Here, I'll show you. I have a monthly calendar and then here at the bottom of the page, Right?

Did I check my habits? Because I have these calendars, daily habits, zest, freeze, anxiety. You can see the zest has been, it's been pretty good so far. The freeze has been mediocre, but my anxiety is getting a little higher. Not high, high. That was not high, high. That was last week. But so I was thinking about my anxiety. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, I got sober when I was 19. And that means I have 37 years of sobriety, for those who are counting, I'm 57. And I started working on healing from the unusual trauma I experienced as a young person.

I won't say unspeakable, I can speak it and I have spoken it, but I'm not going to speak it here. Just trust me when I say It was a few standard deviations out from the mean of the kinds of stories you hear about things that happen to young people. I am not the only person to whom it happened by any stretch of the imagination, but there were some unusual aspects to it that have left me, you know, I have CPTSD, et cetera, et cetera, right? So when I got sober at 19, I'd been in recovery for 37 years.

I've been a peer counselor for 32 years. I've seen therapists and practitioners and gotten the body work and done the working out, and I've created a huge, big life for myself. I have this great life, many adventures in my life, and I'm still having a high anxiety period. And it's finally, I think, dawning on me that It might be the case that I have not one, but two chronic conditions that I get to navigate and navigate well, probably 3 if you include the CPTSD, but that goes in there with my anxiety for these purposes.

I have these chronic conditions I'm navigating all the time and I could say, they limit my life so much. If I weren't so limited by all this, I could do so much more. And I am eager to share what I know with the world. I am eager to have an impact on ending white racism in the world. I mean, there's all sorts of stuff I'm very eager about. And I think, oh, geez, if I weren't saddled by this anxiety, how much could I get done now? Side note, I don't feel that way about my alcoholism. I don't feel that way about my alcoholism in part because I am in remission from active use.

And so my life is being impacted by the fact that I'm an alcoholic because my life has been organized around for me, going to recovery meetings, sponsoring people, having a sponsor, working the steps, having a set of daily practices that I do, all that sort of stuff. Yes, my life is organized around my chronic illness, but it's pretty well managed. I'm not beset by cravings to drink, etc, etc. But my anxiety is a little bit of a different beast. It's a little bit more like eating disorder, right?

You have to eat three times a day. or however many times you choose based on your own plan of eating, but you have to eat. You have to pull food out and put it in your mouth to live on this planet. I do not have to pull booze out and put it in my mouth to live on this planet. As a matter of fact, if I want to live on this planet, I cannot pull the booze out. And yes, I have struggled with disordered eating much earlier in my life, compulsive eating, mostly overeating, which is why I don't eat sugar.

Because if I don't start, I don't have to try to stop, which I can't do. What does this have to do with Stephen Hawking? The anxiety is more, oh, I have to live with, it's a companion. It sits next to me. It's in the passenger seat anytime I'm driving. And sometimes it's driving. and I'm in the passenger seat a little panicked. That doesn't happen as often anymore, but it sometimes does happen that the anxiety, especially the free state, sometimes the free state is driving my car. The good news about the free state driving my car is it just means the car isn't moving at all.

I'm not going anywhere, right? I'm not in danger of crashing exactly. I'm just in danger of not getting where I wanted to go. But I think about Stephen Hawking. I think about those were the conditions under which he was being brilliant. Those were the conditions under which he was sharing his gift with the world. He navigated his condition every day. He navigated life using a wheelchair every day, using a voice activator every day, a keypad. I don't know the names of his tools, but you know what I mean.

He was just navigate and the inconvenience of that. I have people who use wheelchairs in my life. It is inconvenient. The world is not set up better now than it was when we were kids, but the world is not well set up for people who use wheelchairs or have other physical disabilities like that. But those were the conditions under which he was using his brilliance for the world. And so I think to myself, Maybe having anxiety in the passenger seat, I'd say like 28 days out of 31, 30 days out of 31.

Maybe having anxiety next to me in the passenger seat as opposed to the other days when it drives the car, is just the conditions under which I'm sharing my gifts with the world. And I am not a big believer in that everything has meaning. I am a big believer is we can give meaning to anything that happens to us, anything that goes on around us. We can give meaning to it. That the way my higher power works is gives me opportunities to give meaning to those things. But it's not inherent. It's not inherent.

I have to work with my higher power to give meaning to what happened to me when I was a kid. And I do that every day. And I have other projects as well. Right? I'm writing a book. Some days I can crank, crank, crank, crank, crank, and some days I'm like, oh my gosh. And on those days I really do my best to at least sit down for 5 minutes to keep the habit alive. But I may get to stop seeing it as, is anxiety winning or losing today? Which is a fool's errand because it implies that at some point I will just declare victory and stand with my sword on top of the carcass of my anxiety, which will never rise again.

And I'm starting to suspect that is not how it's going to work for me. So maybe that's just the conditions under which I get this book written is that I have periods where a lot of writing gets done and periods where not as much gets done. I have tools. I put, my bumpers in the gutters of my bowling lanes so that I can get that ball down and at least hit some pins. What are those bumpers in this particular writing a book, bowling alley lane? My editor didn't really give me a bunch of deadlines, and so I've asked her.

We have created deadlines. I had to give her something last Friday that was very useful to me. I had an editor once called the pleasant tension of a deadline. That was very useful to me. Everybody in my life knows I have anxiety and I'm very open about it. And then I talk about what impact it's having and then I have resources that I can go to. I have all of you. For God's sake, there's the cadre up, right? Like, I can go into cadre anytime and learn about how other people are handling their anxiety and learn that I'm not alone with it.

It's completely normalized. This is not rocket science. This is not Stephen Hawking science. This is just life. So I'm starting to suspect that The inconveniences of my condition are simply the conditions under which I am sharing my gifts and my brilliance with the world. And that the things that created the conditions in my case, the circumstances of my young life plus my alcoholism and addiction, that Those things shaped the person and shaped the gift itself. I mean, this gift that I have, this understanding I have, the mission I have around white people and race was forged out of all of that mess of my young life and my capacities that I bring to implement, making that mission a reality also forged out of my young life, whether I like it or not.

I'm not somebody who says, oh, I'm so glad all that terrible stuff happened to me because I wouldn't be the person that I am today. I would not wish what happened to me on anyone, not anyone, because the people I don't like had their own version already, because hurt people hurt people. That the people that the people who are struggling so deeply, they already had their own version and I wouldn't wish mine on them. So they already got it. So I'm not saying I'm glad it happened, but I am just acknowledging it forward, shaped, and created me into the person I am, including my desires and my gifts and my capacity to launch those gifts into the world.

Whatever I do, I was shaped by where I was and it's okay if I imagine a great future for myself, but I don't expect that future to be anxiety-free. It is okay for me to reach for zest every day, which for me is being able to engage in upper trend activities of my choosing and it means pleasure and presence in my own life, that I take pleasure in my life and that I am present for my life and I'm learning how to receive even more of both of those things. It's okay and it's good for me to be pursuing zest, knowing that it won't come without anxiety probably because feeling good often spikes my anxiety.

That may just be a condition until it's not. Maybe it'll go away. I don't know. But it's okay to imagine a great future for myself and not expect the anxiety to go away, to just understand it's in the passenger seat of the car, sometimes in the back seat of the car, sometimes for Gen. Xers in the way back of the station wagon. So that's what I have to say about Stephen Hawking, my anxiety and me. Sometimes the things that other people might perceive as limitations, including me, are just the conditions under which I am pursuing brilliance and that those conditions help shape, help that brilliance and that gift take form and bring itself out into the world.

So, all right, it's still Tuesday. Go vote if you haven't. Thank you so much, Cadre. Go in the app, find me, find other people. You will find a home there. Have a great one.