It’s clenching of the jaw. It’s a sinking stomach. It’s shaking, sweating palms. It’s a night without sleep. It’s a constricting chest. It’s a quickening heartbeat. It’s tugging out hair. It’s racing thoughts. It’s routine. The sensation can last for minutes to days. Type A personality syndrome. Neuroticism. Nervousness. It’s been called many things but defining the feeling doesn’t seem to diminish it.
Anxiety thrives in its hosts because it works in both directions—forcing the experiencer to worry about their affairs while debilitating them from resolving any. Completing goals becomes an impossibility when one’s brain is racing down a one-track mindset set on a continual loop. The morning workout that used to allocate balance and self-worth ends up feeling like a chore that keeps getting overlooked. The books ordered never leave the shelf. The art supplies all sit there expectantly gathering dust. Meeting with friends for a drink requires hour long prep sessions of rehearsing cordial conversations and coming up with ways to appear normal.
I can only compare the sensation to constantly feeling as if I’ve forgotten something very important. When I’m in the eye of an episode, I lose all sense of self. Incapable of detaching my identify from that of other’s perceptions of such sends me reeling down a tunnel of worst case scenarios and repressed memories. I’m in the bathroom stall of a Morgantown bar, the off-white tiles beneath me blurring as I struggle for air. I feel at my chest, digging my fingers into my breast to count my heart rate because someone sent me an ambiguous text message. I’m in my bed, half-naked, flinging my blankets off of my sweating figure. I replay the scene of a classroom in my head, repeating my words and the teacher’s unnerved response. Our voices echo in my head—an ugly hiccup from a broken record. I contemplate sending an email. I resolve to forever avoid eye contact. I’m in a driveway over a steel bonfire, sucking down a friend’s homemade moonshine. I reach the wet peach at the bottom and find myself criticizing his girlfriend, saying things I didn’t even realize I thought or mean. She walks inside the house, upset. Our friends don’t say a word. The fear of public humiliation hurts worse than the hangover.
Web MD tells me this disorder is very common, affecting over three million people per year. Consult your doctor. Avoid alcohol. Maintain a healthy diet. I want to throw my computer off my balcony and hide beneath my bed covers. If it were that easy then why is this feeling ‘very common’? Don’t you think we would have tried that by now, Web MD? Anxiety is the subtlest of all diseases, sneaking in when it’s least expected and setting up shop in a space that is vulnerable. And the good American people let it because it is very common, making it less serious than let’s say, Parkinson’s. And it doesn’t help when there’s a large body of individuals who would deem anxiety a choice. You control how you think and feel, they say. Jason can’t help that he’s in a wheelchair. And in some sense, I suppose they are right. I do control my own thoughts. But how I respond emotionally to them is out of my hands. If I could reach up and rewire the severed circuits in my brain, I would. I would reconstruct my thoughts entirely, giving myself a renewed sense of worth and ability and rewrite the Web MD anxiety page to read Easy one-stop fix—just do it yourself. Until then, I’ll keep consulting the internet and the bottom of liquor bottles for the solution to my problems, knowing all the while these can only make it worse.
