anxiety

Now that I am older, I find that I am anxious about fewer and fewer things. I don't know if it is just age and experience or if it is my situation...in that I am not in a nine to five job, trying to balance work and home and time crunching the whole time. So many things used to make me very anxious when I was younger, and even envisioning trying to juggle my old job and a new baby was enough to make me break out in nervous hives. However my current life in not filled with anxiety. If money becomes a big issue, I will just go back to work. If things go wrong, I will just figure out how to fix it. It is a more practical mindset, and I enjoy and appreciate having it.
There are some things though that still make my heart race and fill my dreams with dread. Besides roaches, I mean. Even roaches don't inspire the venom in me that I used to emit, but something else does...people. Specifically strangers. I still really worry about meeting new people. I have terrible new person anxiety, and that has not improved much. It came to a head recently because I picked up my surfboard.
I hate making cold phone calls,. I loathe trying to sell anything. I love the anonimity of ebay and online catalogues where you don't have to actually know the person you are buying from. Why? Because people can be so random! You don't know when you might be trying to break the ice by making a little joke only to have it slice into a stranger's sore spot causing pain and humiliation everywhere. And then there are the people you just don't like. The ones you would cross the street to avoid on any given day or never talk to even in you were in the same long line. But now you are thrown together in a situation, and you just don't know how this is going to turn out.
So the surfboard, wisely, is pick-up only. So I have to go meet this person selling it to retrieve it. This brings out all my old anxieties. The only thing I have to go on is some amazingly poorly spelled emails and the sense of dignity one holds by being a buyer who has already paid. I had to go to a flea market to pick up the surfboard. Talk about a nightmare for anyone with stranger anxieties. My dreams had all been about arguments with these unnamed people with whom I must conduct business, ranging from haggling over price to the dreaded phrase "Oh, someone else already came to get it - its gone!" So when the day finally came to perform this errand, I was not very rested or calm.
However, I found the seller without a hitch, and retrieved the board which was the perfect size although not in the perfect condition as i hoped. It is going to need quite a bit of repair work. The good news is, I have all winter to do this! And it is not difficult work, just tedious, to sand all the dings, tape them off, and fill them with epoxy. The nose and the tail of the board are the worst, and I think I will actually have to re-fiberglass them to make them watertight. However, I am hopeful. Thanks to the internet and the knowledge of perfect strangers, I have seen blogs and youtube videos on exactly all the repairs I need to do. Hurray information age!
Now if I can just get out of meeting anybody else... Scratch that! I still have to buy the supplies to do the repairs!
The weird thing is that sometimes the strangers that you most fear are the ones that become your good friends. It is a magical transformation, like falling in love, where suddenly you just connect on a deeper level. You just 'get' each other and suddenly you are not so alone anymore. It is miraculous in my view that all the anxiety can just flush out like releasing a breath.