It’s December 12, 2013, I’m twenty-seven years old, and I didn’t have a panic attack driving home this morning from Indiana. This is progress. You see, I’m prone to being very, very afraid of driving relatively short distances. To compensate for this, I drive slowly. In recompense, other drivers direct their anger toward me communicating in a language of fingers and horns which consists entirely of insults.

To some extent, I’m okay with this. While I don’t promote anxiety as an approach to life, there’s something to be said for cautious living. For instance, I don’t rush to appointments at the last minute and condemn others for making me late. I leave early and arrive early or on time, mostly. I recommend living cautiously the way sour cream eaters recommend sour cream on taco night.

“How do you know you don’t like going fifty if you’ve never tried it?”

“I tried it once a long time ago and I hated it,” they reply.

“Okay, okay. I won’t ask you again, but I sure am enjoying myself over here in the far right lane.”

But that’s only to some extent that I’m okay, and that’s only one example. When I cook chicken, I wash my hands twenty-some times so I don’t kill my wife by way of cross contamination—the kind of freak accident you might see in one of those Discovery Channel shows about the parasites lurking around in our very backyards. I get out of bed at random times throughout the night to look behind every door and shower curtain to make sure no one sneaked in while I was taking the dogs out and is laying in wait to kill us all.

Some of these behaviors fall into a category of concern that is to an extent reasonable but simply taken too far by me. There is another category, however, that might be entirely beyond reason. I recently bought a water filter. At home, I discovered that the packaging was open when I pulled it out of the box, and I spent three hours under the impression that satanist’s were trying to kill me in an elaborate plot. Three hours is good for me.

To the anxious woman or man, every little bump, freckle, and mole is cancer. We might go an entire night without sleep because we felt drowsy around lunch and can’t stop wondering if we somehow got lime disease on a hike in the woods five years ago. At times, we go a little crazy. Our chests ache. We can’t catch our breath. We sweat profusely. All over the seemingly most trivial or improbable things.

Now, the reason I drove to Indiana was to go to a Christmas party last night at my wife’s workplace. We live in Louisville, Ky, and she works just across the bridge in Indiana. It’s a simple thing to jump in the car and drive twenty or thirty minutes down the road. Yet, for those of us in this faction of irrational thinkers who aren’t scared of being afraid, the simple things can be crippling at times. It’s not the drive that scares me. It’s the impending anxiety attack. And I have to distinguish between the two because I can handle the drive. The drive is nothing. It’s what’s going on in my head that I struggle with.

I told her I was going, and I didn’t want to let her down. I didn’t want to make that call and say, “I’m having another bad night. I have to stay home.” I want her to be able to count on me for the little things. This is where anxiety can start to become complicated. It’s very difficult to be alone and anxious. It can be very, very difficult to be with another person and anxious. You see how it can affect them and every aspect of your relationship. You have this great thing, but there’s this seemingly indestructible monster called anxiety always hanging around. At least, that’s how it felt in the beginning. Luckily, I married a compassionate and insightful woman who made herself a reason for me to grow and heal. In reality, I have a great marriage and a listless, possibly malnourished monster who’s gradually disappearing from my life.

I made it to her party without dying or getting too worked up emotionally on the way. At the time, it was a big and private win for me. I caught a ride home with her, so we could spend some extra time together and picked up my car this morning.

I’ve struggled with anxiety since I was a child, but it wasn’t until about four years ago when I met my wife that I truly began the process of healing. Over the last four years I’ve learned that anxiety is not an indestructible monster, happiness is something that we can learn, and most things probably aren’t cancer.

Through this blog, I want to share how that happened. If you choose to let me share it with you, don’t read it expecting a triumphant account of overcoming magnificent hardship. Think of this more as how I almost ruined my life but didn’t.