Anxiety

Ah, anxiety. The little voice in my head. Why are you so persistent, and unpredictable? Sometimes you are as quiet as a whisper, and I can ignore you and go about my day. Other times, though. Other times you are a relentless scream that drowns out everything else. Sometimes people that don’t have anxiety have a hard time understanding it. “Don’t worry about it.” They say. “Just don’t think about it.” I know that they’re trying to help, but you need to have anxiety in order to truly understand it. It isn’t as simple as just not worrying, or not thinking about it. Anxiety is as a wool blanket. It surrounds your mind with scary, irrational thoughts, and keeps you from getting through to the others. Anxiety typically goes a bit like this for me. I’ll get a headache, and usually the thought process would be:

“Oh. I might be dehydrated. Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

But, with anxiety, it’s more like:

“Oh, I have a headache. What’s Wrong with me? Could there be something wrong with me? No, No.You’re being ridiculous. You would know if it were something like that. Headaches just happen sometimes… But there’s a possibility…”

And the vicious cycle continues for a couple days, or sometimes even weeks on end. After a while anxiety will subside. Sometimes it goes on for what seems like an eternity. Maybe just a matter of hours. But eventually it will subside. Anxiety, you are a shape shifter in everyone. You can be anything at any time. But don’t be confused. You subside, but you don’t go away. You loom in the back of my mind like a dark cloud. You never go away. You are an unexpected storm. Storms always run out of rain, but that doesn’t mean that it will never rain again.