Anxiety
Maybe it’s simply the inevitable rise from the depths of a depression that threatens to leave you stranded at rock bottom, but I can feel a major change coming.
It’s almost four o’clock in the morning, and after lying down to get some much needed sleep before a busy day, I knew I had to get up and write this. I jumped quickly out of bed, something my kitten wasn’t the happiest about as evidenced by her faint growl, and grabbed my computer – the slightest hint of a smile on my face.
It’s difficult to describe – only cliché comments saying things like the calm before the storm, or the slight breeze before a downpour, can even attempt to come close. It’s like the night before school starts each year and each time you move. You lay out your new outfit to wear the next morning and worry about fitting in, about whether the kids here are like your friends back home or if they’ll think you’re weird for liking the things you do. It’s like lying on the beach on one of those perfectly warm days with a nice breeze, and then you feel the wind die down for a few seconds – time in which the only thing you can feel is the sun. You can almost count it’s rays showering heat in waves onto your back, and you lie still just waiting for the moment the breeze picks back up again – almost scared that if you move, something about the perfect moment will be over. It’s like knowing you have an important interview the next day, the kind for the dream job or internship that could shape your future – whether for the better or the worse.
It’s like the inevitable quiet that happens before a first kiss with someone new, the moment when you’re both trying to gauge the others’ reaction to see if they want it as much as you do. The intensity that is present in the mere avoidance of eye contact – and then that moment when you can almost hear the others’ heart beat, only to realize it’s your own beating so loudly the other person can’t possibly not be hearing it too. And in that instant when you realize they have to see or feel how vulnerable you must be in that very second – just knowing they are aware of that state of mind you’re in, and the fact that they’re still sitting there mere inches from you – that feeling of relief washes away all the anxiety you had ever been silly enough to allow in your mind and you finally make eye contact. That feeling of anxiety is replaced so quickly with relief and happiness and butterflies and excitement and a new anxiety for what will come next, that you almost feel like you’re on this roller coaster of emotional turmoil – and you like it. What a masochist.
That’s the current emotional state I find myself engaged in. I say engaged because it’s an action – a decision. It’s a choice to make the leap from anxiety into taking what you want from life. Use that to motivate you. If you can’t stop thinking about something, there’s a reason – indulge your heart once in a while, instead of always allowing your head to sit in the driver’s seat. You might not be able to stand the anxiety for much longer if you don’t.
We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance.