The dictionary’s definition of the word anxiety goes as follows, “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.” Anxiety is the most common mental disorder. Scientifically speaking, anxiety is an inconsistency between the neurotransmitters, GABA, Serotonin, and Norepinephrine in one’s brain.

It is also the sensation of awaking from a dream where you were falling to your demise. An emotion that consumes you and wraps you up in it’s unforgiving arms, choking the oxygen out of you to the brink of your existence then slowly releasing it’s grip. Anxiety acts as the lips that whisper fabrications in your ear, causing dismay in your heart and deliria in your mind. It is the compulsion to scream but reluctance of what to say, you can open your mouth wide to try but anxiety is the shortness of breath and loss of air. The feeling of blood rushing to your cheeks and swelling your eyes shut before you break down in an ocean of tears. You try to swim but anxiety is the riptide that violently pulls your body under the beast that is the ocean. Waves crash over you as your feet get caught in an abyss of rocks, you struggle to resurface but the force is too strong. Maybe this is your time, maybe this is a sign that life is not cut out for the weak that is your soul. Your body shakes in angst and begins to recognize it’s destined extinction, just as you believe your life to be coming to an end the ocean calms and you are thrust to shore. Laying on the beach out of breath, anxiety is the sting of salt water in your deep cuts and the sand in very inconvenient places. Anxiety is a stroll around the universe- never ending.

One can not define anxiety until it has been endured. I have been swimming to safety my entire life. Some years are easier than others. No matter how many pills I take to dull the reality, anxiety is a part of me. Much like a crying baby, anxiety can be distracted but never averted. The pills make me feel calm, like I am living in a dream, I am happy but never emotional. There are no highs, and no lows. There is no dark, and no light. A world in which I try to avert my anxiety is a world in which I am merely existing, never living. Anxiety is a blessing and a curse. I am blessed to be able to feel the many emotions of life so powerfully, yet so very cursed to live in fear of those same feelings. Anxiety is a ocean that washes over my body and dictates my being. For now the horizon is unclear, but I continue to swim.