I am very tired of you, Anxiety.

How I loathe you. This tightness in my chest. This nervous energy. This feeling of impending doom. This darkness that oozes inside of my body, gripping me, grabbing my attention, bleeding into my thoughts and influencing my mood. You are always there, Anxiety. You are always the dark silhouette in the doorway, the shadow in the window, the small fears that prick pins and needles across my body, you are the warmth that washes over me when I feel as if something could be really wrong, and you are always daring me to give in and experience the fear.

You win most of the time. You proliferate, you pressure, you haunt and hunt, you stick to me and are slick on me. You are the crude oil of a damaged soil of my soul, and you manifest yourself in so many ways. The skipped beat is your favorite: when my heart does a whoopsie and prematurely fires, you’re always there to scream silently that I am dying, that I am having a myocardial infarction. That I will soon join my father in the grave.

Anxiety, I am so tired, just so tired of you manifesting when my GI issues also start. Something moves deep within me without me feeling it, the vagus nerve fires, the sudden adrenaline rush flushes my body in a wave of that ever-horrid heat, and you manifest as the tightness again. You manifest when I find out any bad medical news, like the moderate calcium in my arteries, or the lung issues that make my chest constrict with exercise, or when you decide today is a day to be present.

You and I used to have a pretty even back-and-forth, but lately you have broken the treaties, and you have invaded the calm fields I used to harvest. You have built up in so many ways that I feel you from the late morning all the way to when I go to bed. You crushing ephemeral force of nature, you haunt my every thought, my every action, my motivations. You give me things to worry over that I have no control over, or things that take time to change. You sit there, rocking back and forth in your fervent fevered state howling into the night of my mind, and I find you to be entirely useless.

In the darkness of a cool night where I once took solace in the stars and the moon upon the shimmer of a cool evening, in my natural sanctum that is the closest thing I have to feeling sanctuary, you have invaded and left me with the nagging in the back of my thoughts that this too will pass and that I will pass and that I will be forgotten and that I will be the food for worms or the ash of fertilizer and that in the end this short life of mine did not matter.

The worst part is that you have ground me down so much that I sometimes believe you. Anxiety, you came from fear. The amygdala was meant to flag threats, the hypothalamus was supposed to relay alarms for those threats, and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis sits there giggling and shitting itself as it sustains the dread. From all of that, buried in the prefrontal cortex of my brain, is a function that is supposed to turn anxiety off if it sets off over nothing… and instead it is asleep at the wheel.

Natural selection selected for caution and fear because in the end it doesn’t cost a lot of calories to be startled and then proven wrong, versus not recognizing a threat and dying. Success is genes being passed on, and a dead animal is a failed animal, so on a scientific level I get it, and I understand you. You were meant to protect me, to keep me safe, to keep me alive, and to keep me functional.

You aren’t. You are the machinery of over a half billion years of evolution. You first rose up as a function with early nervous systems buried deep in the most primitive of our ancestors, and from there fish refined you, and from that so too did the amphibians, and the proto-synapsids, and so too the synapsids, the early mammals, the ape predecessors, the apes… and us. From fruit flies to elephants, you exist within us as the long term consequence of constant predator and prey.

But now it means I can have a full physical alarm and panic attack over a missed electric bill, over the worry of some odd sensation, over the changes of the season or because of a misfiring vagus nerve. You no longer serve to protect me in modern life, but you could be useful for driving, or walking, or being out and doing things. You do not have a use when I am budgeting, writing, or being safe in my own home.

I do not know how to fight you, how to defeat you, how to accept you, how to let you pass through me like I am a Faraday cage and redirect you. I hoped writing this would help, but I cannot say if it did or not yet. You are part of me though, and in spite of medication so far, you have been a difficult other within these last five years. You darken the doorway much like the darkened doorways of my childhood and the fear of what was to come. But unlike that time, you are at the very least predictable once I recognize you.

I do not know what to do with you. But I see you.