What I call anxiety

Anxiety. I am choosing to write about anxiety because I think it is something worth talking about. Not just because it has become fashionable to imagine yourself fighting demons in your head on a daily or hourly basis, but simply because more people should come out and talk about it. Anxiety is probably the synonym for dark. A place where one feels like one has hit rock bottom. Rock bottom in such a pitying way that the culmination of everything till now, appears to be shadow of disbelief. Everything, all the achievements, all friendships, all joys come a screeching halt. And all that is left is void. I am talking about that kind of anxiety.

I am talking of that kind of anxiety where all you feel somedays is just a trance. A trance of irrationality. When standing at the edge of a train track, you suddenly feel, what if? Where days and nights are somehow interwoven like threads in a rustic shawl on a weaver’s loom. You pull one string tighter and something else ruptures, spoiling the pattern at the other end. When you are a tightly wound knot of ecstasy and despair, of nightmares and epiphanies. I am talking of soiled dreams and incoherent realities. I am talking of nights where you run from pillar to post looking for solace in absolute strangers. Looking for an answer to questions they wouldn’t dare ask. Anxiety. I am talking about the static in your head. I am talking about the disease that is constantly eating at your innards and chewing at your heart. I am talking of the torment in your soul. The anger in your eyes. The hate in your voice. How can they say it’s all in your head? When all you have there is noise.

Anxiety and Lucidity. As alternates to an ever spinning coin. I am talking of that kind of anxiety where friends are brief spells of light. And then it’s gone. And then they are gone. I am talking of that kind anxiety where you tightly cling to your friends, trusting their presence as the only proof of reality. I am talking of days of asking them the same questions and they, telling you the same answers. With infinite patience. I am talking of your anxiety and their lucidity. I am talking of your toxic broth of shadows and spells and their balms of laughter and irrelevance. Spinning and spinning. Till you relegate the noise to the back of your mind. The mind spilling with peels of rotten sense of love. Rotten sense of self. The self that once was and now isn’t anywhere.

They say that you have to fight your own demons. It is you who matters. Nothing else and no one else. But here I am talking of that anxiety that wakes up by your side in the morning and goes to sleep with you at night. I am talking of those brief moments of hallucination, when in the midst of a clutter of emails, distraught meetings and multiple tabs on the laptop, your world suddenly stops, pauses, inhales, and then you draw a blank. A blank where you’re choking in broad daylight. When the only thing you can do is not grab the chair and cry out aloud. In the middle of a busy office. You exhale. Tell yourself, you’re fine. You got this. Blink a dozen times. Blink the floodgates, shut it to submission. One feet in front of another. One day at a time.

Anxiety is when you wake up after months of stupor, look yourself in the mirror and see a stranger staring back. With bags under your eyes, matted hair, an electrified brain and still feel a lingering set of eyes looking into yours trying to see if you would flinch. Flinch and break the moment. And you do. You break the spell, feeling the hurt and hating yourself for feeling it with that much passion. Anxiety is when your love, your hate, your lust, your passion, your sanity and your hurt get intermingled, fused into one big mass of indistinguishable ache lodged in your heart, snowballing into the pit that they call rock bottom. Falling, spiraling, drowning, sinking lower and lower, inch by inch, blow by blow. That is what I call anxiety.