Anxious minds

By Anonymous

The following piece explores anxiety and how it can impact a person. It is a raw, and candid piece, capturing what it can feel like to experience anxiety and how it can debilitate a person. Every experience with anxiety is unique, however feelings can be shared and we hope that this exploration of anxiety brings you a sense of acceptance. That you feel seen, understood, safe. Remember, you are not alone in how you are feeling.

Disclaimer: Please be advised the following discusses anxiety in great detail. Viewer discretion is advised.

It’s like being in a constant state of anticipation of the worst kind, when it’s at an elevated state so as to affect your life minute to minute, that it becomes disabling to a degree that you question your very sanity.

Your mind and emotions are in turmoil, racing in all directions accompanied with physical symptoms of nausea, tight chest – feeling like you’re being throttled. The, what I call “the whoopties”, where your stomach rises up as you get electric shocks, feeling estranged from people the world and life in general.  I think, I’m not on the same page as everyone else.   

I would say it’s deeply traumatic to experience this affliction.  The isolation and loneliness are profound as you feel you’re suffering alone in silence for the most part, hiding inside your invisibility and shame.

So down the mental health rabbit hole and into Armageddon.

It strips you emotionally naked, makes you feel weak, completely and absolutely inferior not up to stuff, lesser than… rendering you incompetent, and you hate yourself for it!  So, you are cast prone to an invisible audience from which you are trialled, judged and condemned.  Fear so intense that it’s impossible to think rationally because your mind is spinning in a disorientated purgatory.  With your world crashing down all around, relentless, no rest or peace, when in its grip you find yourself praying for mercy, but fear has no mercy.  Every nerve in your body feels brutalised, hotwired to and from your internal and external universe; flight or fight on steroids.

To be so afraid and all the while trying so desperately not to show it.  Battling with yourself daily to hold your nerve, get a grip etc. and all this time you are actually in meltdown, constantly under attack running on a track that has more knots, twists and tangles than a ball of wool the cat plays with.  

Then you’ve got the devil himself biting at your ass.  Every hideous monster and grotesque demon you can imagine from the deep recesses of your very core emerges in full force from every direction in an onslaught on the senses.  

Prowling, growling, screaming howling banshees, clutching and grabbing at you with the single soul intent of ripping you apart and all you can see and feel is the hate the rage and the loathing.  I find myself pleading for redemption but there is no liberty until you succumb temporarily to numbness and exhaustion, beaten, burned out, defeated and depleted.  

Even sleep is punctuated with nightmares, then the sun rises and it starts all over again, even though you feel like a fish out of water flapping and gasping in the bottom of a boat in the middle of the ocean with no rudder, alienated from everything.

Mantra’s to me

What I say to myself when I’m feeling this way