Sirens
For our own good. mostly.
One of the perks of living near a nuclear power plant is that the first Monday of the month at noon they test the area’s warning sirens. They’re not just for an incident at the power plant, but are meant to alert us in the event that something has gone poorly.
Except that there’s no accompanying “big voice” to fill in the blanks, whether we should expect a horde of locusts, a wall of water, or if we’re all about to be able to read in the dark thanks to our Dayglo skin.
Anxiety’s like that: letting us know that something isn’t quite right, without connecting the dots. And so we do what we’d do if the siren went off, and that’s either freeze up or just start packing the car because that at least gives us something to do.
Those mechanisms in our brain are meant to protect us, but not always let us know what they’re wanting us to avoid. Eventually they’ll wind down, like the sirens, and we get to get back to whatever counts as our daily baseline.
They’re a voice we should acknowledge, but not always listen to, because sometimes? They’re just testing.