At what point do you have permission to stop being anxious?

15 Oct, 2025

Thinking about how I admitted to my therapist recently that I don't feel like I've tried my best or hardest until I've become absolutely exhausted, and that's when the anxiety spirals think I can stop or whatever. Yet again, I'm going to try to apply to one (1) job — I was feeling totally whatever about it about 30 minutes ago because I'm already exhausted from studying today, but the moment the fog lifts even a little bit, I can feel my heart trying to quicken and my mind trying to focus on the horror of having to interview.

And it's like, c'mon, I don't want to worry about this until tomorrow when I'll have all the day to worry if I want to as I try to piece together a meh resume and cover letter. It's literally not even the scheduled time to worry yet. But when I think about it, it really feels like the best reprieve I get from anxiety is when I'm too tired to care. When literally, the neurons are tired so they just don't fire as drastically anymore. But of course, being tired means that you perform worse, so there's actually no reason to try to go around life permanently tired (and if I tried, I'd probably trip up a health issue).

I'm probably not even going to get to any interview stage yet again, and I'm absolutely not going to get the job anyway when I have 0 experience interviewing and I'm very bad at selling myself. So the best this could be is like exposure therapy-adjacent discomfort tolerance survival, only I have to be careful not to push it too far that it becomes traumatic.

I recently talked to my sister about how scared I am for our Japan trip to even do something like ordering food, even though I'm the one with more Japanese experience between us. I asked her how she survives doing things blatantly wrong without beating herself up about it. Like one time in Taiwan, when she knew less Mandarin than she does now, she accidentally ordered the spiciest beef noodle soup. She said that the store owners were actually really nice to her about it, and they gave her a less spicy one when they realized she couldn't eat the mala soup. Other than that, it seems like she really believes that she can't be the worst person to exist in the worker's life. That point is kind of weird to me because I do know someone who worked retail who would constantly complain about customers being stupid. And it seemed fair enough to be pissed off about it, even if ultimately most of these actions weren't of the extremely rude variety — things like someone not reading a sign saying that they weren't accepting some sort of payment and whatnot. ...Only, a year later, this same retail employee showed up one day in the group chat and said that they made this same exact mistake in another store recently, for which they felt a little bit bad about, but it wasn't completely their fault because XYZ. The hypocrisy of that has honestly haunted me.

A concept my sister brought up that I've been thinking over, though, is that in restaurants, people want you to get your order and all of that. The goals are aligned, because that's how they earn their money. It's an interesting thing to think about, because I guess I've never considered that the other person's goals in an interaction might be aligned with mine. That would make a lot of logical sense in not having to worry because you both want the same thing (to order, eat the food, pay). But if that's true for the majority of cases, where did I learn otherwise?

...Naturally, from the teachers and stuff I had as a kid. I was straight up ignored or talked down to by multiple teachers when I didn't perform the correct action due to selective mutism. Which got me thinking. Are the majority of teachers actually just completely unaligned with any given student's goals? And I've just been extrapolating this too far, to literally every other structured interaction I have to do?

I mean, it certainly makes sense. Teachers for the most part don't care about their students as people or what the students are actually learning long-term. To keep their job, they don't need students to be happy and fulfilled, they need students to perform and parents to not yell at them and for students to hit the given metrics at any cost. This is probably a basic ass revelation that isn't even completely new to me, given that I've already known about how schools in the USA are modeled after factory work and there's the whole argument against the "banking" model of learning that our education is built around.

Yet, I'd argue that East Asian countries do this even worse by having everything hinge entirely on test scores and crazy cram school hours. In my dad's day in Taiwan, you couldn't even choose what you wanted to major in college; your test score determined that entirely for you. He even deferred a year to see if he could study to get a higher score so that he could qualify for the medical department. (He didn't.) I don't know if it's still like this in Taiwan today, but there's something about the parallel of punishment for not performing in (Asian) American schools and the imagined experience I'd have if my parents never immigrated to the USA anyway¹ that makes it all feel that much more inescapable.

But that just has me wondering. In what spaces are goals actually aligned between the "performer" and the "gatekeeper," or the "taker" and the "giver" (to pick random terms off the top of my head)? Are things that have high degree of structure, such as ordering food, more likely to have goals aligned? I mean, it must surely depend on the level of class assumptions that go into this too, as there's no way that a fine dining establishment wouldn't come with extra goals/rules that confer judgment upon all those who fail to dress up correctly, have the right table manners, etc.

So where does that put interviewing? My therapist has also said before that the interviewer wants the interviewee to perform well because it makes their job easier, and they might try to help the interviewee better understand the question and whatnot. But I guess the problem is that there's still a "grading" system at play here, which means that my goals can't be entirely aligned with theirs. I mean, if I "want job" and they want "give job only to the single best person," that's not aligned, now, is it? Or am I supposed to be thinking in a smaller scale such as, "Get through this interview and not explode into pieces" 🤝 "Get through interview without weird shit happening"?

How much of assigning motives, or assuming motives, is useful, and how much of it is just one big giant cope known as, "I don't want to feel responsible for potentially making someone's day worse"?

I really don't know the answer to this one.

#moping