Some people say that in stressful situations I can seem unflappable, and I think that's partly because I'm always kind of internally flapped.

There is an element in which anxiety co-represents with aspects of my personality I wouldnt want to give up. It allows you to have foresight. I may not be as empathetic. Its hard to figure out the difference between pathology and personality.

Anxiety has afflicted me all my life.

To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them.

Somehow, in many of those near-miss instances, I've managed to fight through and continue. But in all these situations, even when they're apparently going well, I feel I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive.