I’ve never been diagnosed with anything, though I haven’t been to a doctor to find out if I had it, but I can feel it in my flesh that I have some kind of anxiety disorder, maybe a few.  It’s this constant hum, like an air conditioning unit in a building, something that never goes away, and becomes so synonymous with your surroundings that you almost forget its there.  Until you don’t feel it, or until the air conditioning breaks, and you’re left with that chasm of silence where you can’t really tell anything from anything else.  You don’t feel anxious, but you feel something completely different without feeling any kind of happiness or contentment.  A completely separate fear, because you’d rather feel the anxiety than not feel it and have it flood your body again when you think you’re doing halfway decent.  You’re afraid of what you could possibly imagine.  If the mind can create anything inside itself, who’s to say its faculties end in the skull?  If you believe your body to be dying, can your mind make it do so in tandem?  Can you kill yourself just by fearing what can kill you?  

It’s a caustic existence, living in a growing pool of inability and hatred.  You see nothing without first seeing everything that could fall apart around it or because of it.  Every event must be analyzed, every inconsequential pain or soreness must be categorized and oh dear god, this is the end, I’ve really done it this time.  Every face that looks at you sees deeper than you can see in response, and their voices, all collected, will splinter you into many tiny and irreparable pieces.  You don’t hear laughter, you hear sadness; you feel a hug, you feel pitiful.  And then, oh no, what would they think of you if they knew?  Can you imagine the terrible horror of it if they, who are perfectly established in their own lives, who have no invisible men with coiled thorns to choke them, who do not feel the earthquake in their lower regions when it comes time to face the big bad vastness of that essential question: Are you happy now?  

But, anxiety doesn’t go without its gifts, now let’s not forget.  You sense time like the gods, you conjure every past to view, you foresee every fold in what may happen, every detail, every mistake you could make, every regret you could hold and every way you could love.  Your haze in your own life clears your gaze on others’, like a smoke-filled fire that burns you a path to someone else’s garden.  As if you were their familiar, you see and can analyze every other person around you with a savant level of pinpoint detail.  You are a soothsayer without a god to guide you, a shaman without a ritual to partake in.  

And everything is going fine, everything is going fine, until something you find like a smell you didn’t expect to experience, a song you accidentally play in the car, a word they liked particularly, a face or figure from afar that looks vaguely familiar, and then it’s back to the first day of the white glowing ice up your legs and into your stomach, and you’re there again, hearing the things that were said and placing the things that were not (but should have been) in the narrative, but those are always phantoms, those words always ring about like an empty factory building, and what’s ideal and what you actually know to have happened become like a shadow distorted two surfaces at two distances.  And we call that PTSD, but you’d never say you felt it or had it, because that’s something only soldiers get, you selfish and pathetic waste.  Every day you live in that single moment, picking apart every syllable, tear, deal, protest is laid out, and you pick them apart like little strands of DNA in some vain thought that if this goes here and that goes there you’ll create some other beast that won’t bite your memory quite as deeply and won’t make you bleed a blood that doesn’t dry up.  

But it won’t, and you won’t, and this is Anxiety 1,2,3,4 and you might as well get used to it, because there’s not Christian God OUT THERE no more and He’s left you somewhere long gone, nope, doesn’t want to see you no more, you hear me?  Go see Tlaloc, ask him to make it rain for you, go see Cipactli, he’ll carry your weight, go see Papa Ghede, he might make you a nice little deal.  

This is anxiety.  You are you and it’s going to get fucking hairy from here.   It’s the Anxious Snake Coiling Around Your Chest.