By Harsimran Kaur

You live in anxiety; so you live in a prism of thoughts, indiscernible and ineluctable. My mind is uncertain, life full of uncertainty and the self pleads to be liberated. I live on the edge, the fear loses its balance and a stark darkness prevails in front of the eyes. The body shivers, eyes dilated and the head spins in a dizzy web. The mouth is coarse dry and the ears buzz free of bees. The stomach churns ingloriously; crying incessantly in defeat to keep the food regulating; do the corrugated intestines have anything to say? Perhaps, the cramping has led them astray! I see the nausea rise up to my throat; is it the fear echoing to put my guard down and surrender to the flow of inscrutable reflux? I often do and I am not able to eat. Hunger eludes me and I don’t want hunger to return because I don’t want to eat. My fears have already hogged me up; I am empty in my stomach and my mind.

They say an empty mind is a devil’s workshop but my mind is full of obsessive thoughts but I still look like an eldritch hammering the knuckles to the cumulonimbus head. The thoughts repel like a synapse lost; the disconcerted neurons play a battle of undefined patterns. I ask them, “What did I do wrong to deserve their insolence?” Serotonin, the ‘feel-good neurotransmitter’ and Dopamine, the ‘reward center’ of the brain no longer do the pas de deux. My body is left bleak and I am belaboured of their declining love-interest. The ‘gut’ has become a labyrinth of misaligned contractions and the brain is now a reclusive hermit. Can they ever be in balance or would harass me throughout life with an impending doom?

“I” here is you, me or anybody who has incurred the wrath of the apocalyptic anxiety. 

I hope there is no doomsday where I become mentally incapacitated; well! That’s another thought that does not leave me. Where and how it gained momentum, I don’t know but is here to stay as long as mental bereavements continue. Bereavement of what you may ask? Losing my sanity; why not? Living in dread all day is like being taken imperceptibly to an abattoir where the dried axe is cut through the neck; not in an instant but through imperturbable reflexes of left to right—right to left, not knowing when the crude antagonism will strike. Anxiety is worse than the ultimate slaughter; the reflexes continue and the head remains bent in incessant subjugation. The rise of the ‘dead’, sorry ‘head’ would not garner any kingship of any sort; my salutary slave tenacity remains!     

‘Anxious’ seems a sophistically coined term. One could also call it ‘desperadoes’ or ‘death on a run’. Perhaps, ‘anxiety’ and ‘death’ both are intimidating; anxiety is a ‘pyrrhic death’, ultimately it leads you to dystopian world, annihilating the very existential purpose, full of remorse of don’t know what but guilt becomes a contemporaneous buddy. ‘Death’ is ‘Death’; it does not awaken you in the morning at all so there is no repentance.

Anxiety has sullen mornings; tea cup replenished one after the other. What we are filling it with is unprocessed emotions. Let’s talk about the cryptic evenings; the veil of darkness, the reclined chair has nothing more to offer than slipping our fingers again through the tea cup to check on if the day was worth living. The nights harbor the anxiety by taking pill that slows down the perceptible acumen to think, eyes shrink to oblivion to a spurious sleep, a shudder here and there, the body inconsequential to awaken now. The new morning brings in hope but the anxiety in flesh crawls in the mesh of setbacks and calumnies.

Yes, ‘setback’ is the word, furtively occupying the frazzled mind, bringing in all the inequities to the forefront. A past trauma or an emotional scathing by a loved one climaxes like a torrent of perfidies’. Anxiety is the unprocessed insight and understanding of the beleaguered emotions, beguiled into a phantasmagoria of clipped thoughts that eventually become the ‘perfect reality’. The reality then becomes an imprecation to stop judging life, the vitality diminishes and the all the mind encompasses is an irrational fear that holds itself ‘schtum’ or questions the ontology crusading in a blood-curdling blasphemy. It’s a circle I wish could end but it does not; it’s not because I don’t want to end it but it has so much become a part of me that any attempt to forgo still leaves behind frizzy dimensions, and one day it all again is en masse as if it was never to leave.

Medicines suppress the charred emotions but don’t correct it. How can they? It can only correct the imbalance after the setback but what about correcting the functioning of the brain that resulted in a particular behavior pattern before the upheaval. When the ‘trauma’ first made an appearance in its most grotesque form, the mind with its own imaginary wit prophesized the outcome, it still lives with it, remembers it and slights at the smallest intervention to correct it, because it was not wrong in reacting at the first place. It’s just that this was how it knew to gather it wings, spread it to fly away from the de trop.

Whenever the trauma resurfaces as a memory or conversation, the mind is quick to enter a panic mode of the same sentiment, however, today with therapies, outcome is more evaluative, and has resulted in controlled behaviors’, however, anxiety is still the pernickety worm burrowed in the mind and body, serpentining the anomalous rigidity of forlorn thoughts. Sometimes, I feel it’s an invisible demon that strangulates my inner core to make me despise ‘living’ but there is something that the ‘soul’ searches to guide me back to the sanctimonious shelter of my ‘being’. Anxiety breaks the soul, sabotages its perpetual velocity to feel; the et saq, the body hangs like a drooping shoulder around a weak scapula.    

Is there something we can do about our anxiety? Medicines do their work to help us go about life in physicality, but mentally we are still living with incoherent emotions. Can ‘divine knowledge’, its contemplation and meditation bring about a change? Can alternative therapies help the inner ghost to settle down, and help us connect with the soul that needs healing?

We would be attending to these points in the subsequent article.