Anxiety wakes you up at 5:30 in the morning. It keeps you wrestling with crazy thoughts and makes you analyze your dreams. Anxiety is considerate of no one. It doesn’t care if you’re tired or busy or need to think of other things. Anxiety makes you dwell, puts one thing above any other until you’re so consumed by this tiny idea that it’s impossible to function normally. It’s all you think about, talk about, worry about. You breathe your anxiety and it radiates out of your pores. Anxiety causes doubt. Anxiety thrives on fear. If just yesterday you were confident, anxiety snatches any trace of potential happiness and all you can imagine is failure. Anxiety takes over your life. There is nothing else. Sure, you may smile. Laugh, from time to time. Write an essay, go to a movie, cook dinner. But the anxiety is still there, with every word you type, every scene of the film, every stir of the pot, it’s there. And it doesn’t escape you until you know. Know for sure, without a doubt, no-turning-back certain. Until that phone call, until the one awaited moment that turns it all around, you are not truly alive. You are a slave to anxiety and dead inside.
I can’t wait to live again.
April 2, 2007 at 10:15 pm |
I was struck by this post. The past 2 years of my life have been filled with more paralyzing anxiety than, at times, I could deal with. My anxiety wasn’t caused by waiting to get a return phone call for a job. In fact it was quite the opposite. Other things in my life had led to be jobless and pathetic. I couldn’t reconcile what I had become with the false image of myself I so strongly clung too. Sorry to be so personal. I just felt like I was reading about myself when I came across this.