Anxiety

This is what it feels like to have your heart racing and not knowing when or if it will ever slow down. Your fatigued body can not keep up with its rapid thumping against your chest, you’re winded after climbing a flight of steps. Just the thought of tomorrow leaves you gasping for air, only its not refreshing like the first breath you take after being plunged under water. It’s tight and sharp as if your lungs are collapsing in their cage like two popped balloons hanging lifelessly in your chest. This is feeling like your socks are filled with stones and the world is zipping past you on roller skates. This is being a day ahead on your calendar, never learning to live in the moment and letting your life slip under your shaking feet. This is storing your past in the corner of your closet, hoping the clutter won’t occupy the space for your self confidence, but every now and then it likes to creep out to remind you it’s still there. This is remembering the time you fell off your bike in fourth grade, or when you were tongue tied in front of your crush at age thirteen. You can piece events from your life together through flashbacks that will come when you least expect it. A flood of past emotions, still so vivid and alive, rushes over you like a monstrous wave in the ocean that sends you off your feet and spits you back out, salty and heaving for air. This is living in a dream state, one you wish you’d wake up from so you can feel the ground beneath your feet. This is instability of the body, heart and mind. This is learning to walk again, carefully thinking through each step so you don’t send yourself falling. This is questioning yourself constantly, wondering if everything you’ve set your heart to is worthwhile, because, afterall, your mind has been impaired by your drowsiness of nights staring at a dark ceiling, not knowing what is holding you from rest. This is operating on fumes, slowly disintegrating into just flesh and bone, losing your focus and strength to your clouded head and aching heart. This is worrying so much about what has yet to change, that you don’t have the conscious to take a look at what is changing, to see the nothingness that you are slowly evolving to. This is trembling hands, this is stuttered words, this is the inability to unclench your tense fists. This is independence. This is holding yourself at gunpoint, and not knowing which side to surrender. This is being the enemy and the survivor. This is telling yourself, “It’s going to be ok”, but not believing in the words you use to try to soothe your rigid body. You don’t know if you will be ok. You have lost control over yourself before you had the chance to try and grab the wheel. You’ve become so attached to what is to come, the thought of what has captured you may never cross your mind. Maybe one day you will learn that there is no use in trying to run from the beast, for it will shadow your every move. And maybe one day you’ll learn that to stab it would be a mistake because you will find yourself with bloody hands and a dying heart.