Finding someone you truly connect with is one of the best feelings and realizations there is in life. I’m not the best at describing my emotions (I probably rank somewhere near the bottom to be honest. Emotional illiteracy is what I’ll call that) but if I had to put the body-feeling into words, it’d be something like this uber-hyper sensation in my chest that compels me to move around.

Whenever I’m really into someone and I’m talking to them, I have to pace around as I’m doing so. It helps release excess nervous energy — the feelings and sensations in my body I have for the other person can’t be contained or expressed while I’m sitting down. In some way, it’s linked to this hyper-ish tight feeling in my chest. It’s like a reaction to having met an amazing person, someone who is like me but also different from me in all the right ways.

These feelings can have their drawbacks. While usually pleasant, they can manifest in an adverse direction. This could be by distracting me from doing something I wanted to do but now can’t because my mind is reeling or from thoughts of anxiety messing with my stomach.

A lot of times when I meet a new person who I really connect with (which is fairly uncommon) I can panic when I don’t get the response I’m expecting or want or I don’t get a response in a timely manner (by my arbitrary standards). What if they don’t like me as much as I thought? What if I mess it up somehow? How is it possible for someone this awesome to actually like talking to me as much as they seem to? Something’s clearly wrong here…

While these thoughts seem silly after the fact, once I’ve re-established communication with the subject of my anxiety after what felt to my ape brain like an eternity, in the moment they are very real and it can be difficult for me to summon the composure or peace of mind needed to ground myself. When episodes like this happen, I think of the phrase “mind over matter” (which doesn’t hold up under scrutiny I feel but let’s put that aside for a second). Usually it’s put forward in a positive context, in that you can fight through pain or some other situation. But the mind’s deceptive skills can be applied just as often, if not more frequently, in a negative context, like the example I described, where it catastrophized mere thoughts into what my body perceived as a real crisis.

This is why understanding the nature of suffering and how it relates to attachment is so important. When we let go of clinging, a lot of stressors fade away. Relationships with others should be pursued and cherished of course, but it’s because of clinging that my mind goes to the places it does when someone I love is no longer in my line of sight. It can be hard for me, particularly when I feel I need reassurance, to get through my head that other people are — believe it or not — probably just doing other things and exist beyond being characters in my story. But it has to be done for the sake of not just my mental health but the health of my relationships. And practice makes perfect (or insert other aphorism here).

And just a little aside to close us out: a lot of my anxiety is due to the nature of modern communication. Back in ye olden days, people had to fight their family members for time on the household landline phone. Even further back, one might not hear from a lover or friend or other pen pal for weeks or months (or perhaps years, if they had the kind of relationship that could stand it) outside of the occasional letter. The advent of IM and then texting really has spoiled us and created a bunch of new anxieties that would be foreign to people just two generations back.