a written history of my anxiety:

i never knew what anxiety was until i explained it to myself. it was myself, 7 years old, lying on a soft chair that was a roll-out bed, staring at the stars on the ceiling of my bedroom at my grandparent's house, listening to their gentle snores - reminders that they were alive and not passed on to a realm where i could never reach them.

year in and year out, the memory remains the same but with small changes at every turn. is there something crawling on me? do i have too much body hair? are we going to crash? am i going to fail? what do they think? what is (enter person's name) doing? question after question after question -

and yet i never noticed it. the tingling in my fingers, the feeling of spinning, the ringing in my ears, the tightening of my chest without warning, the feeling of being short of breath, the intense moments of fear, the paralysis, the tears, the stream of words flowing from my mouth, the desire to stay as far away from crowds as possible, the fear of failure, over and over and over again, like a clock ticking out the time of infinity.

it was only when YOU left that i realized it had a name and i stopped thinking that maybe my stomach was trying to invert and kill me slowly. i could keep it at bay in college - though memories pop up in my head, binging and purging, crying on the bathroom floor, insomnia, drugs, alcohol - but when i started to do away with my vices, so stopped my ability to bypass these moments.

and then, with even more intensity, came the moments where i realized my anxiety manifested so many times with YOU: when i couldn't reach you, and i allowed my mind to think, convince myself that you were dead, that something had happened to you, sinking to the kitchen floor with tears running down my check, letting the food burn on the stove - and i think about how right you were for leaving, because who would want that?

in the quiet of my townhouse, in the dark of my office, looking off into the horizon as the sun sets quietly, without notice, another cold december night - all i can think is of the tingling in my fingers, the ringing in my ears, the dull ache of my head, the sharpening of my breath and the pain in my chest, and, after the persistent thoughts of sinus infection and thyroid cancer and ear infection and stomach cancer subside, i realize that this monster finally has a name.