It’s sickening to talk about anxiety, it’s sickening to be, it’s sickening to be here. But this is me, this woman who is tormented by the inevitable. I was that mom who couldn’t say no to permission even though I knew that behind everyone there was a night full of anxiety. I seem to be looking for anxiety.

I usually look for answers to my symptoms in dictionaries. The first definition given by DRAE seemed very concise: 1. f. Sadness, sadness, anxiety.

The definition I identified with was this: from the Latin angustĭ (“tightness”, “difficulty”), anxiety is anxiety or trouble. It is an affective state that implies a certain psychological discomfort, accompanied by changes in the body (such as tremors, tachycardia, excessive sweating or lack of breath).

I often seek help from a valued friend: the French philosopher André Compte-Sponville. Your vocabulary is wonderful. He defines anxiety as a vague or vague fear, without a real object, which makes it more overwhelming because in the absence of an immediate danger to fight or escape from, there is no possible response. And the philosopher asks: How to overcome nothing? How to escape from what is not or what is not yet? And he answers: (anxiety) It is a premature and invasive fear that suffocates us, or dominates us. The body goes crazy, the soul drowns. The afflicted is not afraid of anything at all… the afflicted lacks being, as it lacks air. Nothingness scares him, and that is anxiety: the terrifying sense of the nothingness of his object.

But here in Ecuador there is much more than nothing. How can you not have trouble looking straight ahead (involuntarily wishing) how politicians end the country? Some due to indolence, others due to excessive caution, but all, without exception, due to egomania and megalomania. Surely public office is easy prey for so many pirates, for after what I have seen, I doubt their desire to serve.

How can you not have trouble looking straight ahead (involuntarily wishing) how politicians end the country?

When you think you’ve seen the worst type of politician, when you think he can’t be more disreputable, jerk and mediocrity, other worse ones appear: clowns even more rude, “chained”, obscured, condemned.

Sometimes in my personal storytelling workshop, my students and I look for answers in beautiful words, in poetry. last week we read along the side of the roadFito Páez: In times when no one listens to anyone / In times when everyone is against everyone / In selfish and petty times / In times when we are always alone / We will have to declare ourselves incompetent / In all matters of the market / We will have to declare ourselves innocent / Or we will have to be humble and heartless / I no longer belong to any ism / I consider myself alive and buried.

I leave hope to young people, I doubt that will change. Every day more and more new rich people will be born, great wealth will remain, and the poor and hardworking will lack everything. Live worse every day; and yet he returns to the belief in satraps and returns to illusions, while I die of agony. (OR)