1. Ever been in a situation where
2. Suddenly, the air feels thick
3. It’s getting hard to breathe.
4 .And because of that,
5. Now your throat feels tingly
6. Before you know it...
7. It’s now become hard to swallow
8. Your breathing stops
9. You can’t let them hear the intensity of the inhalations
10. You try fooling those who surround you
11. And most of all, yourself.|
12. They feel like they’re swarming around me like killers
13. Remember
14. You’re in a calm state of mind,
15. Except you’re not.
16. The harder you try to remember what the calm state feels like
17. The harder it becomes to swallow the saliva that has accumulated
18. The saliva feels warm and indigestible
19. You’ve kept the noise down, but really
20. Will they hear the gulp?
What inspired me to write this poem was the struggle of anxiety that I have within myself. Anxiety is a struggle that many teenagers, like myself, face; in fact the National Institute of Mental Health states that “An estimated 31.9% of adolescents have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.”
With that being said, I felt my topic would be something that many teens would be able to feel heavily as they read my piece, the apprehension and sensation that I have developed throughout my poem uses the descriptions of such. I used similes, for example on line 12, it reads “They feel like they’re swarming around me like killers” as to say ordinary people create a tense atmosphere, an unravelling sensation of fear that has no place to be there in the first place, yet it finds itself there anyway.
The structure of my poem also plays a big role into how I paint the picture, in that I follow a sequence of events where the reader vividly imagines the accumulation of saliva and the dense air that fills their lungs bits by bits, even the internal thought process of how each breath and drop of saliva makes the reader feel self conscious, knowing that the people around them can hear the anxiety that fills inside them and will go as far as to strike them as the awkward type. As a person who has anxiety I get that feeling that I myself am awkward, with some studies even mentioning that over half of Americans that have anxiety seemingly describe themselves as “socially awkward”.
Social awkwardness is closely linked to anxiety as both involve feeling stressed, uncomfortable, or self conscious. It’s not to say that I am driving the attention away from the idea that I myself struggle with anxiety with all these statistics, but that I understand those who also struggle with anxiety, and hope that my piece also makes them feel heard and seen in the ways that I describe the anxious state of mind that takes over me, feeling as if your body is frozen and you can't act.