Drabble.

Oh, anxiety, I am so angry with you. I never thought that could happen, being angry with a concept. You're right up there with love and hatred - you can't be wholly defined universally. You mean a different thing to everyone. 

I mean, you've got your dining chairs and your bean bag chairs and your comfy dad chairs, but a chair is always a chair. No one will ever know if the way that I perceive love is the same as their own perception. 

The same goes with you, anxiety. You're not real. You're not a concrete object, but you are the force that works against me everyday like gravity, which, by the way, is apparently not a downward force, this universe is a lie. 

Maybe I shouldn't be awake reading theories about outer space but maybe I could also learn a few lessons from my perception of anxiety. Let's jumble these two together and make a blog post, yeah?

(What does that even mean? Jesus Christ, Einstein, you're long dead and you still stop me in my tracks. This is why it's a compliment to call someone an "Einstein" but using my last name as an adjective would entail nothing more than a disorganized concoction of about five of the seven deadly sins and also bad jokes. 

Alright. Fuck physics, fuck astronomy, fuck Einstein. Gravity is either a downward force or a distortion of the shape of space-time, or maybe it's neither, and some new smart cookie will come out and say, "No, gravity has been this all along" and everyone will want to buy baby foods with his or her name on it. That doesn't matter. 

But anxiety is more than just a perception. It's like this: love doesn't exist in the concrete and physical sense, but if you ask me if love is real, I'll tell you damn straight. And you'll ask me how I know, and I'll tell you that I can feel it. 

But I can't point it out to you: I can't tell you that love is feeling stubble against your cheek because you might not like facial hair. I can't tell you that love is your boyfriend trying extremely hard to make a pun from "Sleeping Beauty" that will always be redundant because that might not be your sense of humor. 

But is it real? Is it just as real as a bean bag chair? Of course it's real! 

Or time! Time doesn't exist - clocks exist. But yet we have minutes and hours and days and all of those are composed of seconds and we call it all "time" even though we can't really define it or weigh it or poke it with a stick. We are dependent on the confines of time because we need its structure to give our tiny, finite existence meaning in a seemingly infinite universe. We need time to exist, so it does.

But love, time, hatred, all of those things can be just as concrete as that unfashionable bean bag chair. Do people even buy those anymore? They can weigh on your chest just as heavy as anything else. They can suffocate us. 

The same goes with anxiety. I wish it were something that was easy to define. I suppose, put simply, it's fear. But it is more than fear. It is when you take fear and you turn it into a state of being. 

For me, my anxiety often focuses on dying young. But I'm not afraid to die young, no more than anyone else in the world. But my anxiety allowed that small little flicker of awareness of my own mortality to turn into a wildfire. My body basically really, really fucking sucks as a firefighter. My body needs to be fired from the squad.

It is hard to struggle every day with something that doesn't exist. When you cut your arm open, you can see it. You can see the blood coming out of the open wound. With anxiety, it's easier to dismiss. Your body is perfectly fine. No one expects there to be anything wrong with you. Sometimes, people don't even believe you. It is not something that makes your heart stop beating but anxiety can definitely kill you. 

Anxiety might not exist in a physical sense, but if you were to ask me if it is real, I would say damn straight. I know what it is to me, and to me, it is probably the most durable, concrete, hard-as-hell-to-destroy thing I have ever come across.

Anxiety is a downward force, if you ask me. Or maybe it's a distortion of the shape of space-time. It may even just be the subject of the sloppy musings of a young woman in the middle of a sleepless night. I'm not intelligent enough to make that call.