I Have Anxiety!

From outside it’s easy to think that somebody’s got it all figured out,

I must not have a care in the world

As if it were expected for my demons to be worn like a Scarlet Letter pin to my chest,

and they assume if you cannot see it then it’s not really there,

As if the pain does not exist unless you’re bleeding or slowing in a cast or staggering with a limp,

But sometimes the most painful demons are the ones that can’t even see

So we learn how to smile,

How to grin and bear it,

Because nobody likes to talk about the tough stuff

Huh! Actually I don’t like to talk about the tough stuff

I have anxiety

It feels like every cell in my body is moving so fast that my veins are blurry,

That despite the constant metronome of my heartbeat inside my ears it’s like listening to a spastic drumline

Feels like bees in my ears like a broken white noise machine playing all of the sounds at once and I don’t even realize

I’m gritting my teeth or cracking my knuckles or rubbing my forefinger

Holding on to myself like I’m the only lifeline

Bridging the gap between reality on my own two feet and the atomic cloud abyss of noises and sounds and feelings of fleeting rushing through my veins

And I’m avoiding eye contact not because I’m not listening to what you’re saying

Because I’m listening to the sound of my own voice hoping that through your ears

you can’t hear, that it’s two octaves too high and on the verge of breaking because my palms are sweating and I somehow forgot to speak with anything behind my words other than insecurity.

My anxiety feels like fire, I’m explained idly hot and rash and frustrating as I am not the inside of my cheek, as if the solution to this feeling is buried between my teeth and gums.

It feels like drowning but it feels like burning and it feels like… forever

I imagine my feet moving with trails of dust behind them,

like those cartoons because

Somehow it feels like I’m moving faster than the 60 seconds they’ve allowed in a minute,

All the while I’m just playing catch-up on the stopwatch

It doesn’t add up as it did in high school Mathematics

I can’t carry the one and find the square root of the problem,

because most of the time there is no problem.

There’s no life-or-death situation,

There’s no rhyme or reason

There are just feelings and I’m feeling all of them at once

Some days are better than others