Pain.

Anxiety isn’t a dark cloud. It’s too much light. It’s not a steady rain; it’s unannounced flashes, too bright, and sudden bursts of sound: a lightning storm. It’s pure fear — dysfunctional fight or flight with nothing to hit and nowhere to go.

Anxiety isn’t sleepiness. It’s sweatiness. It’s not slow; it’s too fast.

It’s short sentences with no full stops and nowhere to catch a breath.

It’s not an inability to do anything; it’s an inability to do nothing: a pressure to do everything but the knowledge that I can’t.

It’s solitude with, still, too much sound.

It’s reluctance, it’s toast and tea, it’s jealousy. It’s a healthy level of doubt and an unwelcome amount. It’s a desire to be normal without being naive.

It’s overstimulation to exhaustion, to tears, too hopeless. It’s sitting on the floor of the apartment doing nothing, watching nothing, hearing nothing, speaking nothing, and feeling too much. It’s deadly. It’s a free fall with no view of oncoming Earth. It hurts.

It hurts. Anxiety isn’t a dark cloud.

It’s loud, bold, cowed, and overcrowded, but anxiety is not a dark cloud.

Stay gold,
Sabrina