A Loud Brain & An Itchy Body

[Listen to an audio version of this blog HERE.]

Life is all madness and unknowing and wishing there were some way to leave my body. I dislike how I inhabit my body so much, dislike how itchy my body is. How loud my brain sounds. The only way I know to temper the madness of an itchy body and a loud mind is to scream, or run, hard, until my brain feels numb and my body feels calm and I can breathe again. My therapist says this is something like anxiety, or maybe, just anxiety. And she tells me I’ve created a body that needs to move to feel calm and a mind that won’t ever feel calm unless or until my body is tired. It is exhausting to live in this brain. To feel like I must always be doing, creating, moving. To always be agile and tactile and loving and raging and hurting and laughing and cracking apart at each joint until I am nothing but a soft pile of hard bones, with a brain perched on top that is buzzing like a hive of yellow jackets coming for me, I am coming for myself.

This is what it is like to live with anxiety. To live with ADD. To live with an eating disorder. To live with so many labels, sticky notes super-imposed onto my forehead, my forearms, my belly, so the world knows exactly what it’s dealing with when it meets me each morning. So much of life depends on myself, and that is a terrifying realization; a terrifying thing to wake up to each morning. That is…