Panic In Prose

I’ve been searching for a way to explain my anxiety. My depression. My hypomania. I’ve been searching for a way to explain it in a way that makes sense to people other than me. I’ve spent nights lying awake in bed describing it in masterful prose, swearing to write it down in the morning, but the words always left my head by daybreak. Of the 3, I am most pressured to explain how my anxiety feels. But, the depression and hypomania deserve a gallery in the museum of me as well. That’s why this will be a post in 3 parts. But first, my anxiety.

Before I had words for this. Before diagnoses were placed. Before I was who I am, my stomach hurt. Or rather it was on fire. It always starts in my stomach. It’s not like the pain and discomfort from food poisoning or menstrual cramps. It’s something I struggled to describe. So it just hurt.

It’s more than just a pain that starts in the stomach though. It’s like thick, boiling syrup. The temperature keeps rising and that thick, boiling syrup starts to spread throughout my body, pushing itself through my veins. Every pore on my body opens up like a pressure release valve hoping to ease the pressure, yet only releasing sweat. My whole body is awash. But now it’s not thick, boiling syrup. It’s electricity; my skin is the conductor.

All this time while the blood in my veins has turned into molasses bubbling on the stove and my skin has become some strange field of static shock, my heart is trying to escape this deadly environment. It wasn’t built to live in the magma of the earth’s core or to fuel the buzzing of kilowatts beyond my comprehension. It wants out. It wants to find a place fit for its survival. I try to convince my heart to stay put by breathing. But my chest no longer has the ability to expand. So it’s short, shallow breathes. Grasping at what little oxygen I can get in to tell my heart “it’s okay, I’m still taking care of you.”

While my body is going through some sort of metahuman transformation my brain is trying to convince itself that none of this is real. My blood has not turned to scorching molasses. My skin has not become a supercharged electromagnetic field, and “Oh shit! Can everyone else see that I’m freaking out? Fuck. Everyone can clearly see that I’m freaking out.”

I’m now fighting the physical feelings overwhelming my body while also trying to not look like I’m tweaking out. Then it happens. My thoughts turn into tv static. Nothing is clear enough to be a discernible or coherent thought. It’s bits and pieces. Fuzzy fragments of fear, embarrassment, shame, guilt, rage, and the low buzzing of being too close to live powerlines. I can’t understand what’s said to me, what’s written in front of me, what I’m hearing. I’ve just gone to a foreign country in my own head with no way of translating the language.

Sometimes my anxiety wants to release like Venom from his host’s body and lash out, destroying everything and everyone within reach. My life is littered with broken bits of things and people I once loved because my anxiety had nowhere to go but out. Whether I broke them physically or with my words, they were never the same again. You can patch a wall up but fixing what was broken by your words is pretty much impossible.

However, sometimes my anxiety crawls within, clinging to me and controlling my movements like some sort of horror movie parasite. Attacking myself to appease its needs. Clawing at my skin. Pulling out my eyelashes. Hitting myself. Hoping that this pain will supersede the anxiety and maybe this self-sacrifice will appease the parasite I have angered. My skin tells stories of every time I’ve brought myself to the altar of self-sacrifice to just make it stop.

One thing remains the same. The tears. The tears always sting in the way tears that don’t want to be cried burn. They are hot and they are unstoppable. They stream down my face in what seems like a never-ending march of defiance. I’ve always hated crying in front of others, not because I was ashamed but because I knew that tears meant my last defense had crumbled and soon so would I.

After the boiling in the belly. After the electrified skin. After my brain goes “bzzzz.” Once what is valued is shattered. Once the damage is done. I fold into myself. Fold in, fold up, implode. Once the panic is gone, the panic that I didn’t realize felt like an elephant riding my shoulders, I feel weightless. I feel nothingness. I feel empty. I want nothing more than to sleep for a thousand years. And I do sleep. I just wake up hoping that the damage isn’t so bad this time.