Speaking is believing

When worry lies heavy on your heart, what can you do to assuage it?

There’s lots of things I’m too scared to say. It feels like if I say the words out loud it makes them real - my voice gives them a weight and a dreadful presence that weighs in my gut and fills me with dread. There’s something about the finality of speaking. What is said cannot be unsaid. Think before you speak. If you can’t say anything nice...

It’s not as if I believe I have special powers. That would be absurd, wouldn’t it? Magic isn’t real.

But that doesn’t seem to matter. The potential words choke me; they don’t have a physical presence but they’re real enough.

Even then, I’m scared. Terrified. Because all those things I’m too terrified to speak - worry of death, harm, failure, sickness - they’re all caged up in my head, and the locks are all broken. My tongue might stopper the words, but not the thoughts. They buzz white-hot through my brain, slinking behind innocuous thoughts to get past my defences and get a clear shot. Like hitmen, brutes waiting not in dark alleys and shadowy corners but masquerading as friends until they’re suddenly not - and then the fight begins. An image, a scenario. A pang of emotion - guilt, anxiety, fear, grief, nothing good. It’s a sticky sort of emotion, clinging like greasy sludge, and it stays no matter how I try to ignore it.

I can’t not think about it. I try. I think about something else, something happy or funny or boring. Anything that’s not the brute nasty thought. But I know I’m avoiding. It’s like trying not to think of the drop when you’re inching along a narrow path on a cliff. No matter how hard you focus on the horizon, you know you’re only looking to try and avoid catching the gaze of the grasping, hungry void next to you. The horizon’s just not that interesting. So even as you’re watching the point where the sky meets the earth, you’re half thinking about you meeting the earth.

Kersplat.

I’ll be focussed so hard - must not think about that - that my thoughts circle right back round to the brute. I mustn’t think about the airplane crashing. I mustn’t envision the way the engines cut out. The panicked text message to my parents. I love you. Mustn’t think about that. But the more I try not to think, the more information my brain provides. Like I need to know every exact detail of what I’m not thinking about in order to avoid it, like memorising the attack patterns of a boss in a video game. Dodge left when the scythe glows red. What if the surgery goes wrong? When he glows blue, hit him quickly to stop the charge attack.

Sometimes, I can get away for a little while. If it’s daytime, and I can find something to do. Maybe I’ll read. Or go for a walk with music. Maybe I can drown the thoughts out by diving into one of my internal fantasies - dragons solve a lot of problems, you know.

But night leaves nowhere to run. I need to sleep - can’t get up and do things, or I’ll disturb other people who are sleeping. No reading; I have to sleep. If I could do things at night, then my anxiety would make me super productive, in bursts. But I need to sleep. I have school, or I’m meeting with friends, or I’m working tomorrow, or I’m just so tired my eyes are itchy and I’m crying tears of frustration becauseI just. Want. To. Sleep! And now I’m worrying again, and it’s so infuriating because the worry about not being able to sleep is what’s stopping me from sleeping. If I could just turn my brain off - snap - it would be so much easier. Siri, lights off. Siri, brain off.

On the off chance I’m not experiencing sleep-induced-insomnia, then the darkness lets all my other thoughts ooze back in. There’s nothing to look at, nothing to do except think. And like I said, these thoughts scare me.

Taken to their logical conclusions, they’re so absurdly unlikely that worrying about them is ridiculous. And, at 11:30PM and three states away, what could I possibly do about it anyway? Half the time I’m worrying about things three weeks in advance or a month behind me.

My emotions don’t care about logic. The chances of my stove - empty, turned off at the wall and checked five times before I went to bed, then twice more when I got up to pee an hour later - setting fire to my house overnight? You’d be hard pressed to find the odds with an electron microscope, twelve months and six researchers. A three billion dollar research grant couldn’t find those odds. But that doesn’t stop my gut clenching with worry. What would I try to save from the fire? How would I get out? I can see the flames casting orange flickering light over the walls of my mind’s eye, and I wish I couldn’t. Thinking it doesn’t make it real. I know that.

If I say it. Think it. And it happens. Is it my fault?

I know the answer is ‘no’.

But my heart is still scared of the words. So I keep them all locked up in my head, and I drown.