omg, this so triggers my anxiety

A quick note before you start this one. If you actually have anxiety, the one your GP is medicating, the one that has made your life smaller for years, this letter is not for you. Forward it to the friend who keeps announcing hers at dinner parties, and skip the rest. This one is for her.

The tote bag cost $11.99. I looked it up. It was not a donation to a charity. It was a purchase.

You are virtue signaling. Everyone can see it. You know everyone can see it. That is the point.

Who are you kidding, love.

You do not have a mental illness. The barista misspelling your name on the cafe-macchiato-oat-milk-extra-cream-no-foam-half-syrup is not, I am sorry, a trigger. It is the ordinary small friction of being a person at a Tuesday counter. Your twenty-seven second breathing exercise that you filmed in the Starbucks bathroom was a tantrum. It has been a tantrum for the last four years. The only reason nobody in your life has called it that is the tote bag. The tote bag is the coat you put on the tantrum.

I want to offer you a test.

Let us commit you. I will drive. Saturday. We will go to an actual state facility that houses people with actual mental illness. You know the kind. You have seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The rubber soles, the chunky men in white coats, the shared bathroom, the medication cart at 4pm, the woman in the corner who will not stop screaming.

Spend forty-eight hours there. Tell the nurse about your anxiety. Show her your tote bag. Ask her if the cursive is embroidered or iron-on. See what she says. See if the woman in the corner stops screaming long enough to hear you out.

Or.

You can take off the little costume and step back into the mud with the rest of us.

In the mud we are all, various of us, ordinarily unwell, in the way of being a person in 2026. We have trouble sleeping. We do not love our mothers in the uncomplicated way the greeting cards suggest. We drank one too many last Friday night and said something to our sister we now have to walk back. We are jealous of the friend who got the promotion. We are tired. Some of us are pissed off. None of us has a virtue-signaling tote bag.

Here is the thing I am not allowed to say in a session but will say to you in a letter, which is that the tote bag was never really about anxiety.

The tote bag is about specialness, dressed as suffering.

You wanted a way to be seen as more interesting than you are, without having to become more interesting than you are. The label is trendy and free. The label let you out of the group.

Oh, you poor thing, she has anxiety.

Conveniently, it also lets you out of the things you do not want to do. I can’t host, my anxiety. Can’t come Saturday. Can’t be the friend you need this week. I can’t finish the essay in time. I can’t handle criticism. OMG, it’s my anxiety, don’t you GET it?

Every sentence ending in my anxiety is a sentence in which you are exempt, and any woman with a spine in her life is tired of hearing it. You’re exhausting us, love, and it’s time to call you out.

Here is the extra bit, the one that should worry you a little, and which nobody in the group chat is going to bring up.

Your body is loyal. Your body is also not clever. Carry the bag every morning for five years, keep performing the tiny breakdown, keep collecting the omg same replies, and somewhere around the sixth year your body will hand the condition back to you without the trendy costume and social attention. It will be yours to live in. You will not be able to take it off and hang it in a closet. And by then, love, the girls who bonded with you over the tote bag are wearing i’m just wired differently, which is this summer’s ADHD costume, which will be over by Christmas. Nobody is coming with tea. They never liked you that much. You were the tote bag, they were the tote bag, the wave of the trendy tote bag has passed, and so did the friendship.

So pick a door, love. It is a small mercy that I am letting you pick.

Saturday I drive you to the facility, you spend forty-eight hours finding out what this word actually means, and you come home and put the bag in the bin yourself.

Or you put the bag in the drawer tonight, you learn adult phrases like I don’t want to or I am sorry, I have no valid excuse, you stop performing an illness you do not have, and you step back into the mud, right here in reality, on a Tuesday, with the rest of us. The normal people live here. There is room for you too.

There has always been room. You were never as special as the bag told you.

xx, so...

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