Story. November 2014
5:54 PMI tried writing something fictional but ended up just writing about my struggle with anxiety and melancholia. Things got really personal really quickly. This is probably the most raw piece of writing I have done. I wrote it in an hour, saved it, and haven't looked at it until tonight. Feeling a little vulnerable posting it, but I feel like I should. So here it is.
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It was like when you wake up and notice that
your arm has fallen asleep. It starts first with the pain of pins and needles.
Your heart beats faster. Anxiety. Soon, though, you succumb to the familiarity
of the pain. Your arm disappears. Melancholia. It started like that, too.
Butterflies she thought were caused by a midterm that never went away. Things
began to get more and more difficult. Dressing in the morning became
impossible. It seemed she had been fed caterpillars – it was in her genes to
struggle with anxiety – and they had finally all decided to hatch from their
cocoons. But moths have short life spans, and soon she was left with the
carcasses her anxieties left behind. Or perhaps she grew used to them. Soon the
pins and needles faded.
She sat numbly thumbing the
edge of her Norton Anthology of English Literature, staring just beyond, or
maybe just before, the words on the page. Everything went a lovely kind of
fuzzy. She was trying to feel but everything seemed muted. The black words on
the page faded to grey, and the white behind it followed suit. She read a line
of Shakespeare. Nothing. She took a sip of her coffee, god how she loved
coffee, and still nothing. She was trying to shake the melancholia that had
recently overtaken her. Everything around her looked grey and her coffee tasted
like it had been roasted for a few minutes too long and her books didn’t smell
as lovely as they once did.
It’s hard to get a grip when
your hand is asleep, but the blood flows so long as the heart pumps. It is only
a matter of time until the satin sheets run smoothly between her fingers and
his stubble scratches her palms and she can truly feel again.
Peppermint tea, she thought.
2 comments
As someone who was also hounded by anxieties throughout my university years, I'd say: continue to be courageous. The biggest thing I learned was to not take things too seriously. My best was good enough.
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