Anxiety

Anxiety is like a fungus of the mind. It grows swiftly, infecting and wrapping itself around all my thoughts. Especially the good ones. I like to let them grow, but so often I look at them and find anxiety growing on the underside.

 
I have no choice but to destroy those thoughts, removing them as one would remove a sick flower, regardless of how beautiful it might be. My headspace is a massive place, but most of it is unsafe; much of it is utterly rife with the fungus of anxiety, and worse yet the cancer of depression. I have a bunker to hide in, but just outside I’ve cleaned myself a space. And I need to keep that space clean.

Anxiety must be destroyed. Any thoughts that it has grown on must be completely removed; if not torn from the ground they grow in, then dissolved in a wave of cleansing sodium hydroxide. To destroy them, though, is awful, horrible, painful. It leaves a cold, burning emptiness in memory of what once was there, a thought that could have been greater.

I have to protect myself. But sometimes the pain is too great to bear, even as I see the flowers at the edge of my garden fading and turning black, crumbling under the weight of anxiety. And I cannot stop it; merely attempt to contain it within my mind, so that it does not cause me to hurt anyone else.

But it’s so lonely in here, and reaching out means stepping out of my garden and into the infected wastelands…