Anxiety

It starts out in my stomach.  Like waking up and realizing that you have an exam that you didn’t study for.  It’s that innocent sort of panic – the kind that rears its head when you believe you are the world and everything in that world is vitally important.  It’s self-centered.

And  yet it sits in the gut as there is no exam and you are not behind on anything.  But then the magic ladder starts to form – the one that takes what happens in your gut and brings it to your head.  And you know you can’t let that ladder be built because as soon as it is, the feeling stops being just a feeling and it grows into something malignant: it becomes a tumor.

But not going up the ladder is impossible now that it’s built.  After all, you’re sitting at the bottom of it, and the ladder is calling out to you louder and louder, and you have nothing to do at all but sit there at the bottom and listen to it.  It calls and you think you can resist, but then you feel yourself going onto the first step, slowly.  And that’s where the ladder has you as it is not a progression of steps.  Since you have been here before, you get the express route.  Your body knows what it’s doing and it does what it knows.  So you take that tentative step without really even knowing what you are doing and all of a sudden you are no longer in your gut.  Now you are living the life of your head.

A thought jumps in from the outside.  You have no idea where it came from; where do any of these thoughts come from?  And it starts to circle.  It gets faster and faster, and you try to keep your eye on it; you desperately try to keep your eye on it because if it gets out of your sight…  Well, if it gets out of your sight something truly horrible will happen.  You can’t totally define that horrendous happening, but that’s part of the terror of it.  You keep your eyes trained and yet as the speed accelerates, you start to get dizzy.  The rest of the world no longer exists.  It’s just you and the thought.  And the sound gets louder and louder, and the louder of a sound the thought makes the less the thought even makes sense.  The motion and the sound have overwhelmed all of your senses until…

It explodes.  You can’t keep it in anymore.  The pain is too great, and so you let it out.  You share your fear to neutralize it, and for the briefest flit of a moment, things seem a bit better.  But you know better than that.  The thought isn’t the problem – the vortex is the problem.  And so that thought is gone but you are immediately transported back into the vortex, but this time there are multiple thoughts.  Worries and fears, both legitimate and fabricated, fly through your brain so fast, but this time, you can’t keep track of them because there are so many.  They spin in different directions and at different speeds and they make different sounds.  And the twister gains momentum and newer and newer thoughts are added until all else stops.  The world inside the brain is too powerful.  It can’t exist with outside motion, and so who do you listen to?  Do you listen to the malignancy or do you listen to your body and get out and move and see people, hear sounds, smell scents?

Why of course you listen to the malignancy because it is the only thing that is real to you anymore.  You no longer only feel the panic of those terrible moments alone with that one thought.  The thoughts are too much now, and as such, you can’t feel anything.  During normal times, you may think that feeling nothing could be a pleasant feeling, almost peaceful.  It’s the absence of pleasure but it’s also the absence of pain, and how could that hurt?

But human beings are not meant to live without feeling.  Feeling is what life is.  We have our thoughts and our experiences and our environments, but life the experience boils down to our feelings.  They are all that is real even when they are false.  Our feelings are our reality.

And so when a person lives without these feelings, literally with nothing but nothingness inside, the result is pain.  It’s a balloon trying to keep its shape without helium.  The balloon tries to stay whole and yet it constricts and with each contraction it’s pulling the life out of the balloon that so desperately wants to stay whole.

And so this void, it becomes everything.  And yet you desperately seek a way out.  The void is wicked though: each place it leads you brings you further in.  It tells you to be still because the void is so loud that you can’t stay standing with more noise.  But all that does is give the void more strength.  It tells you to stay away from others because they will just add more noise to the twisted void, and yet when left to yourself, you can’t remember that anything else exists.  It tells you that you are desperate and clawing and drowning for meaning, and the more desperate you become, the more fuel you add to the twister and the more the void takes over.

You wish and pray and grasp and claw for something, anything, to get you out.  You try to find meaning in people and things and thoughts you love, and nothing will break through.

Until one day you wake up and you keep your eyes closed as you lie in bed.  Up from the center of the vortex comes a flower.  It’s small and it has a very long stem and it reaches up to you.  Everything in the vortex is black and gray, but this single flower is pure white – a white that can’t be found in the normal color palette.  It glows, and it’s mystical, and it’s real because it’s not of you or of this Earth.  It comes from somewhere else, and somehow this flower can reach your soul.  You hold desperately to its petals.  You proceed cautiously because you fear any hope, but then this hope is something new and refreshing.  As you grasp on, the flower starts to recede back through the vortex and this time, you are going along with it.

Finally, it comes to an end and it places you on your feet on solid ground.  And you look around in wonder because it seems like ages since your feet have touched the ground, a lifetime since your mind has been anywhere but in the void.  You look around and everything is tinted with the light of the flower.  And you realize that all of the thoughts that were contained in the vortex slowly start falling like ashes around you, landing on your arms and your head, your face, and your feet.  But the thoughts are no longer gray and malignant.  Now they are white and light and you recognize them as some of your greatest loves.  It is here and now that you realize that all that was twisted up in the vortex is all that you love the most.  But the storm took it and it twisted it into something dark and bitter.  Now you see them, your family, friends, loves, interests, passions, and instead of bringing you into a twisted void, they mold to your body and give you strength.  They become part of you again and you grow from them and with them.

You walk around, buffered by all you care about, and you see the tornado flying away.  And it’s odd when you look at it because it’s a thing – it’s not All, it’s not the World or Reality, but rather it’s a small location that flits away into nothingness.

And you are left wondering about it all.  How can something seem to utterly real and cause so much pain and yet be so unbelievably small.

But you walk away from it.  You are living now.  You are one of the live ones again.  You escaped the death of the void.  But it will always be there somewhere in the back of your mind, just waiting.  You know how very easy it was to take that first step on the ladder, and you’re pretty sure you will never take another step in any direction without at least the slightest trepidation of where it will land.