6/20/22
My anxiety is a shadow of familiar comfort
The twisty turns of intestines
An internal chokehold with no physical release
Me and my brain are tumultuous lovers
Creating art emotion expression
Pain fear and question
The biggest burden is anxiety unknown and unresolved
An orphan to its origins
It broods silently in the corners of my mind
Loudly screaming in its eerily silent nature
A cacophony of ambient unease
Speaking animatedly in tongues I do not comprehend
It spatters, spits, and gasps viscerally
Constricted, croaking longingly
For unavailable love, affection, and attention
An indelible stench of putrid inner desperation and denial of self
She co-conspires with apathy and anguish
Whispered complacencies
Tempting me to crawl into its depths
The waters are choppy and opaque
Something lurks beneath thirsty for blood
Perfectionism buoys me in a sea of shame
Fortifies my neuroses
My dreams are deviating and daunting
Self sabotage serves as a soothing savior
Thoughts and words of others amplified
While the cord to my own is disconnected and frayed
Cycling and distorting and stretching
In a cognitive washing machine of rumination
Calling me names I’ve never heard aloud
Absorbing and fading
Saturating and spinning
A habitual disorientation disguised as necessity
A heavy duty cycle of hypervigilance with extra rinse
Transfixed
I marvel and fear it
I grasp for release from it
I miss the old me
Carefree
Age three
Grasping mama’s knee
Before I learned to survive by saying sorry
Force molding myself into what others saw for me
Unspoken rigid expectations enclose me in a room
I grew up in, but couldn’t grow in
My thoughts sliced and reconfigured, engineered for optimal approval
Secret desires determined defective and corrected
Parasitic criticisms being exorcized with exercises
Of mindfulness
To know myself, I must return to myself
She feels like a familiar ghost
Frozen in childhood
Ready to thaw, pouring out to me
Shrieking pleas, anguish from what I did to her for my survival
I mourn all that she needed and didn’t have
I am shocked by our immediate and familiar bond
Our fascinations agnostic of practicality and rationality
When I talk to myself, it’s us talking to each other
Risking perceptions of insanity for inner lucidity
She comforts me with selfless self love
And I let her shine in the melodies our soul sings
Feeling everything is our soft sensitive superpower
We’re corny and cheesy and it’s all delicious
The sun on our faces is our deepest and most intrinsic pleasure
Co-existing anxiety brings us a stockholm-like gratitude
An internal alarm of what we care about most
Screaming our needs, once neglected for so long
We can’t risk the chance of whispers going unheard
