21
I wake to an exhaustion that tries to wrestle me back into sleep. Getting out of bed, I perform my morning stretches – the little I can do to get some motion into my neck and back without aggravating anything. I’m sure my body’s a minefield. Years of chronic pain, of anxiety, of obsessive introspection, has groomed my mind, and my sympathetic nervous system, to fixate on anything untoward, and then exaggerate whatever’s reported. While I’m lying on my belly, arms outstretched, and arcing my shoulders and upper torso back and forth twenty-four times, I feel if I just fall still, I’ll drop back into sleep. It’s a weird juxtaposition;…
20
I lay in bed, waiting to hear voices. My psychiatrist has asked me if I have heard voices, and told me if I do I’m to ignore them, so hearing voices must be a possibility. I’m nineteen, and new to anxiety, panic attacks, and everything implicit. I don’t know what I’m facing. I don’t know what might come. I don’t know anything, so a mental health professional is logically my guide. I’ve never been so conscious of my thoughts. Like everybody, I think about what I might have to do, but only inasmuch as how it connects to do what I need to do in the world around me –…