The bad

So where did I leave off? Oh yes, I went to sleep in a panic one night and woke up a new person. Well actually, more of a breathing, walking, raw nerve-ending. What followed was the worst day I have ever experienced.

I had a children's birthday party to attend that day and I went, assuring myself that I was bound to shake it off at some point, like a bad nightmare, and the bright light of day and a festive atmosphere would dispel the last of the jeebies. Ridiculous notion. From the moment I left the house I was in a state of hyper-awareness I didn't know was humanly possible. I might have felt like a badass Terminator if I wasn't so thoroughly freaked out. My sense of impending doom was so heightened that my eyeballs were trying to watch everything at once, spinning in their sockets, scrutinizing all that moved, assessing its danger to me. Also, HAD EVERYTHING ALWAYS BEEN THIS LOUD??

I was experiencing a total sensory overload...and I hadn't even arrived at my destination yet. The party was nothing short of horrifying. I sat in the corner of a couch, trying hard to control my visible shaking, burrowing my way into that couch as much as the springs would let me, with my pupils dilated and a dessert plate in hand with an untouched piece of cake on it. I sat in the little rabbit warren I had created (with my ass) and wondered why I felt that these people I had been around all of my life were now, clearly, gibbons. Screeching and hooting at each other, moving swiftly from place to place with long loping arms, snatching at the party food on their plates, or to scoop up their cake-smeared offspring who were climbing the walls to pop the balloons. This is not a birthday party, man, this is the goddamn jungle.

I had clearly lost my mind.

I may make light of it now, years later, as I'm looking back on it with a mind that is now much more informed about the nature of anxiety, and the many-headed hydra that it can be, and just the knowledge of it alone is a mighty weapon. I'm sure that the party attendees that day would NOT be very amused by the comparison to apes. However, they don't want to know what it was really like, coming home in that state of cognitive dissonance, and they certainly wouldn't have wanted to see the nervous breakdown that immediately followed. Frankly, I don't think it is possible to describe something so abstract at all. A razorball of sound, color, fear and sad? Newp, I won't attempt it, and we'll move swiftly on.

Next post - "So, I'm not crazy then?"