The Story Behind Anxiety
Many nights as I drift off to sleep, my mind runs away with itself. I think of all the things that could go wrong. All the ways that the fragile house of cards that is my life could tumble to the ground. It doesn’t matter how irrational all these thoughts are. They invade my mind, and I can’t get rid of them.
I didn’t know I had anxiety for most of my life. It wasn’t until I was reading stories from people with anxiety describing what it was like and how they felt that I realized that it described me perfectly. I knew I was jumpy and depressed, but I thought that’s all it was. I didn’t realize it meant something.
As I began writing poetry, I decided I wanted to write something about anxiety, about how it made me feel. As I thought about it, I got a sense for how I wanted it to sound. I wanted it to be fast-paced, to relay how it felt in the way the poem sounded.
I wrote a few drafts of Anxiety before settling on the final draft. Very few lines end the statement or sentence, unlike most of my other poems that have more natural line breaks. This gave it a faster pace, which is how I always read it.
I liked how it turned out in the end. Not only the faster pace, but the fear and desperation, both of which set it apart from most of my other poems. It shows that sometimes, things can be bad, but that’s okay. It’s important that the people we care about know that we’re not okay all the time. For everyone reading my poems, I feel it’s important that people know that they can be happy despite suffering. While Anxiety doesn’t show that on its own, its place among my poems does.
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