A Brief Moment
2025-10-27
My anxiety attacks have been getting worse and more frequent lately. I'm not sure why. My body is getting more and more exhausted from the constant heart racing and sweating and tension. After an attack, the level of exhaustion is unsustainable because the attack is such an intense experience that my nervous system doesn't have a good way to respond to it. All I've been thinking about over the last few days is how much I want to anesthetize myself. Going through all of this feels strange, especially given that there doesn't seem to be a clear impetus.
There's been a lot I've gone through. Minor inconveniences stack up into major turmoil. I'll take a single misstep or drop something—a small thing—and it'll escalate to the point where I'm pacing around my room for an hour trying to deal with the overload. It's an unbearable pain. When it gets really bad and I don't have any kind of immediate relief, I lay down in my bed and try to sleep it off. Sometimes that works, but many times I'll just get back up and get caught back in another nervous cycle.
Writing these entries has been harder recently because I don't want to be so negative, but I feel that it's important to show these kinds of things in this day-to-day sort of light. People want so much for life to be this simple thing, a simple background for the types of experiences they craft in their minds: an adventure in some exotic part of the world or a triumphant display of opulence and splendor. But they don't want to show the drudgery of the normal life. They don't want to show how everyday life is a far cry from anything remarkable. Most days it's more of the same, but even worse than that the mundanity is mostly seasoned with stress. Something has to get done, but it's hard. Maybe it doesn't get done. A horrible thing could happen and make the mundanity shift into danger. It's all so tiresome.
At this juncture, it seems that I'd rather complain and find a silver lining, but what if there just wasn't? The worst thing I deal with that people hate to admit the most is that all of this crying and bullshit is less than bad. It's nothing. There's no substance to any of this thing that we like to call 'experience.' The hardest truth is that suffering is simply just a distraction, a way for us to forget that there is nothing here. Life is a vapor. It's something we can go up and immerse ourselves in, let it surround us. But it evaporates, goes away, and doles out the harsh reality that it never really was even there.
So even in this vast and empty sea of mist, what is the reason why I feel so anxious? What is this harsh and malignant desire to live? Maybe I'll never see it here in this life of mine, but there's still an inkling that my words will let the sands of time sit still for just a brief moment. In that brief moment, I hope to find peace.
For a moment, I'm here. Maybe I'll call for help, but what if I let myself feel the tension instead?