Dear Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD),
Trumpeting that you and I, Genie, are on a first-name basis like a burnished brass instrument amidst a melodious symphony is, admittedly, an underestimation of our codependency.
I remember being introduced to you—the beginning of my end. I had always been acquainted with your tidal waves—recurrent hurricanes devastating my intertwining villages, the framework being dilapidated one, two, three times over, one following another suit like a controlled demolition—and as a result, you weren’t a textbook outlander. You bore this hardhearted familiarity, like that coronated high school monarch you catch wind of, yet bestow your best attempt to evade throughout the corridors. Your stampede throughout my African savannah oftentimes constituted the conventional wildebeests of terror-stricken hyperventilating, gazelles of erratic rationalizing, and lionesses of blistering teardrops of sorrowing.
Although you had been a cyclical matinée heretofore, nothing would’ve rehearsed me for center stage, my individual deprecation headlining within the crestfallen limelight.
My eventide that day was orchestrated without reinvigorating slumber, myself the puppet of a celestial ventriloquist. My mother had prevailed from a dire operation unto her spine, and my sleepless gears were pirouetting within my subconscious. That autumnal twilight would be hallowed within Chinese dishes and the plush furniture of the cinema, myself venturing to eradicate the Roman ruins of disquietude suffocating me; a consecrated acreage of quintessential human experience.
I was incarcerated into an aftermath: my leading anxiety attack. The tarnishing iron bars and cinderblock walls environing me were menacing within their imprisonment, my cognizance hastily becoming disjointed from my corporeality.
I remember being petrified of my reflection glowering with disappointment and anguish back at me. I remember my bodily joints smoldering with trepidation, my lungs inflating and deflating with sporadic rhythm contradistinctive to the unfaltering tempo of a metronome. I remember phoning my afflicted mother with innumerable electronic chiming, my sentences like a broken record; “I feel like I’m dying”, “I think I’m going mad”, “I’ve forgotten how to breathe”.
Ensuing what I irrefutably had determined had been a millennia, but was a mere half an hour to forty-five minutes, I copped some z’s, extraordinarily fatigued from the incessant apprehension.
When I awoke, my azure eyes haggard in the way only mental illness can wreak upon your psyche, I professed to myself that I would “diverge into a yellow wood” of quiescence. What had transpired had resolved, and I took that as gospel.
Much to my dismay, this was not prolonged.
Since that tormented dusk, Genie, you and I have underwent therapy appointments, psychiatric consultations, and a myriad of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, from Prozac to Cymbalta to Buspirone. We have succumbed to exasperating insomnia, and we have been diseased with a pathogen of mortifying nightmares and intrusive thoughts. We have contemplated self-mutilation as a coping mechanism, and we have sustained conflagrant flesh within the fortification of our lungs as we drown—like when we would catapult ourselves from the docks at the tepid lake throughout that hazy summertime—amongst a vehement sea of a crowd. We have blundered at academic assignments from the unmotivated personality you exhibit, and we have tolerated one another’s influences throughout assessments, inclusive of the presentiment of inadequacy and rejection.
You and I have amalgamated into a backwoods soul; into the statistic that 3.1% of the United States’s population will be a martyr to Generalized Anxiety Disorder (Facts & Statistics). The statistic that 5% of Americans between twelve and nineteen years of age employ antidepressants (WSJ). The statistic that 13% of juveniles will make a run at and/or envisage self-harming (Emergency Help).
It’s bittersweetly mystifying when you’re vacant from the construction of the hustle and bustle of the daily grind. Astonishingly, the exploration of existentialism throughout the Milky Way Galaxy without you provokes a “naked” sensation, like when the springtide erupts throughout the atmosphere, and gradually, you’re able to sport your preferred sundress again as opposed to your previously denim-clad legs.
You feel alive. You feel alive and nothing else.
Genie, albeit you have induced the uttermost melancholy of three AM hours within the plagued marrow of my bones—you have acculturated me to what it authentically means to be a humanoid entity upon Mother Earth. To appreciate every blade of grass that blossoms from the earthen soil. To love those who are hardest to love. To forgive the ocean for washing away what I had surmised I needed.
In spite of this, it’s throughout this concurrent eight hundred words of acknowledgment to you that I’m disembarking upon letting you go. You will everlastingly be alongside me, and I will everlastingly be alongside you—but I must flourish like a willow within a foliating timberland. I must live, and with your fingertips asphyxiating me, I’m incapacitated from myself. I’m impuissant within my interpersonal relationships, for you customarily take the reigns and drive me into the ground. I’m inefficacious artistically, for the whimsicality I once upon a time enshrined within the fibers of my pulsating heart, I now forage for fragments of.
Simplistically, I’m not the unparalleled adaptation of myself. I’m not what I necessitate to be all of the characteristics I yearn to breathe and bleed for.
I will be her someday within the impending morrow. Even if you are there, too.
Love always,
AGP
