Anxiety Made a Construction Zone in My Head, and I Can’t Find My Hard Hat

Monthly essay - May 2026

Content note: This post recounts a recent bout of intense anxiety and depression, but does so by leaning into a bit of levity. I’ve found doing so helpful, but I acknowledge that this posture does not always land well for everyone. Please consider your own well-being and needs before you engage further. And if you’re struggling, I encourage you to seek out help. The National Alliance on Mental Health offers many great resources and advice.

The inside of my head has become a construction zone where a million mini men are running around in flapping orange vests, sweating profusely, trying to hold on to their hard hats, panicking and yelling because no one secured the crane on the northeast end of the site properly, and now it’s swaying and screeching before finally falling and crashing into the nice, new, pretty building we worked so hard to erect.

Down the street, there’s a 10-car pile-up because a minivan slammed to a halt when it saw the crane come swinging. The drivers stumble out of their cars, dazed, holding their heads or arms or shoulders, mouths gaping open. The cars behind them, with no idea of what’s ahead, blare their horns like it’s a competition to be the loudest the longest. Several car alarms are shrilling into the chaos, and someone called the emergency number, so the sirens are screaming now too and coming from multiple directions.

The six guys assigned to manage traffic have frozen, each one huddled against the next, blowing their whistles over and over in short, persistent rounds. To make matters worse, someone accidentally set off the tornado siren, and now all the office people are pouring out of the buildings, flapping behind them suit jackets and briefcases, clambering over each other to make a mad dash home to secure the dogs and kids as if such a thing were even wise, much less possible in an actual storm, but this clusterfuck can’t be blamed on bad weather. It’s all self-made, and even the ones with authority to set straight the chaos have thrown their clipboards in the air and taken off running.

Trying to sleep through all of this commotion is nearly impossible. Sometimes the panicked construction crew lets me fall asleep, only to start banging their hammers against the metal beams at midnight or 1:30 a.m. or, really, anytime they feel like, insisting that the integrity of each one needs to be tested, must be tested, and now! Other nights, as soon as I turn off the light, they put their steel-toed boots back on their blistered feet and run up and down my chest in great waves, and I lose my breath, panic, catch a breath, oh thank god, then lose it again, claw for it again, all while they run their stupid laps, panting and sweating and crying because they’re so convinced the whole project is doomed.

When I rouse myself in the morning, they’ve already donned their now-ratty orange vests again and get right back into it. They don’t walk for anything, only running, and it causes quite the mayhem, so much tripping and yelling and spilling of boiling coffee and swearing. They’ve decided to demolish all the buildings on the site and restart because they aren’t sure about the accuracy of any of their measurements anymore, so you can imagine that everything is now a level-one emergency, lots of smashing and jackhammering, and they never take a break, not even for lunch.

I book a meeting with the site manager to learn the cause of all the unrest, and all I get from him while sprinting alongside his rattling, rusted-out truck is the unsecured crane. The crane fell down, and now the whole construction zone is a mess. Nightmare for management! he says. Absolute nightmare!!

Against my better judgment, I mention out loud, Well, I guess no one thought to stabilize the whole ordeal before we began building.

He stops, actually stops for a full 2.3 seconds, looks at me fully for the first time, and says, yes, exactly.

Huh?

He tears off, gravel spitting up behind the truck. I cough, rude, fan the air, and then ohhhhh.

Just then, a taxi pulls up to the gate, and depression pokes its head out of the back window. Depression! Of all the possible visitors! I have to tell you, I nearly became a man in an orange vest flailing around the construction site, stumbling over jagged blocks of concrete, yelling nonsense through a bullhorn. There I was, just trying to figure shit out with the site manager of my anxiety, and lumpy dumpy depression shows up.

I march over there and tell him, Roll that window right back up and get the hell out of here!! He looks up at me in his usual gloomy way and says that, Unfortunately, it’s a crank window.

I lose it then.

Wasn’t that just like him!! To find the last taxi in this city to have crank windows so he’d have yet another thing to make just ever so slightly, incrementally harder!? I smack the car, and he doesn’t even jump. We stare at each other for a long while, just staring while the clamor of anxiety rings and gongs behind us, never missing a beat. He finally sighs, sludges out of the car, and climbs up on my back.

Standing there, I reach for the last thing I know. I write it all down. I can’t stand the reality, so I rip out the draft and toss it aside. I cry and try again. I think I’m stuck here now. I write another draft, throw it away again, cry some more. I don’t know how to make it stop.

One lone orange man who has only ever walked in circles, muttering to himself, finds a scrap of that writing floating around somewhere near the site sewer and reads it. He actually stops walking, stops the circles, and reads it. The foreman comes to yell at circle guy like he does every day, but stops short when he gets handed the scrap. He reads it. He walks it over to the demolition crew, waves it around, and they pull back from their sledgehammer swings to listen. I listen, too. The foreman reads it aloud, and it turns out those self-absorbed fuckers like hearing about the impact they’ve made!

Well, okay. I stop crying. I can work with this.

So now I print out little bulletins of my drafts and drop them off at the work site every morning. Depression and I watch from the outside the barbed chain-link fence while they pass around the stack. Sometimes they even go so far as to sit down with a cold pop to read a poem about the latest crisis they’ve caused. Until now, they haven’t made the cut by name, but here I finally am, giving them their moment on the page. Tomorrow, I’ll print out copies of this, maybe even add some clip art of boots and cranes, and pile the stack next to the crispy, burnt coffee pot they worship as their one luxury. Who knows, maybe while they’re busy reading, all the shouting and stumbling, all the blaring and swearing will stop momentarily, and I’ll have a chance to peel depression off my back, negotiate a truce, and walk away.