Imagine fear gripping you at every step you take. Imagine you are walking in the park and you panic, your feet, your gut, your hands shiver from the inside and you can tell there is something wrong - but you can find no logical reason to it. You feel nervous - so nervous as you might feel if someone held a gun to your head, or told you your house was on fire and all your belongings were burning to cinders. Your logical mind knows nothing of the sort has happened, yet your body is still reacting to the fear, as bodily reflexes do. It convinces you that doom is upon you and only this feeling this feeling of panic is true and nothing else. You end up a nervous wreck. ok, may be not a wreck at all times. But nervous and anxious and on the verge of tears.
Medicines help for a bit but you are afraid of those affecting you permanently. You gasp for breath but none is forthcoming. You realize there is so much hatred in you for people around and you try and try but are unable to get rid of it. And then starts the judgment. You criticize yourself about every single thing you do or have done. The criticism becomes hatred in no time and you hate every bit of yourself. Again convincing yourself that this and only this is the truth. The voice in your head that defends you grows meeker and meeker till it totally fades out. Leaving you with yourself - your biggest fear - your monster.
Soon it takes on your confidence. You stutter and cannot face people anymore. You want to remain eclipsed and you pray to die. You want the struggle to end, the voices in the head to go quiet but they don't and when they do you are too busy anticipating their return that you can barely live anymore. The voices further convince you that everything you have ever achieved was a fluke, a chanced occurrence or a mistake, that in reality you are a fraud even when it comes to something most sacred to you as your work. It hits where it hurts the most and you feel you know how it will end.
You stop taking calls. You mentally distance your closest friends and family because you cannot trust anymore. You stop meeting people or when you meet you are so aware of the 'act' that you have nothing much to say to them. You pretend some more. There are times that you totally forget all nervousness around some people. You forget what you were going through and have a good time. The next moment you turn to yourself and there it is - standing in your face and laughing at you. It has you in its grip once more. Each moment of peace then becomes the lull before the storm. Even as you laugh you are aware that it is lurking behind you and this laughter will only make sure you fall from greater heights into deepest of pits.
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I have been suffering from severe anxiety since past one year or so. It is the worst thing to have happened to me and I am trying to get out of it. Most people around me, actually everyone around me, haven't felt it and so I am unable to talk to them about it. It is difficult to share something that you know the listener would never be able to empathize with, no matter how hard they try. They try nevertheless, to give logical solutions to a seemingly illogical medical issue, which only adds to your delusions.
I am going to write more about it here. I am going to help myself get better. This is also just another effort at that. My most non-cryptic post ever.
