A Day in the Life

Anxiety

Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.

My alarm buzzed loudly at its usual time: noon.

I prepared for a panic attack.

I reached for the alarm without looking and threw it across the room. Unfortunately, my alarm clock is also my cellphone. The sun shot through the window and attacked my eyes. The laughter of carefree children at lunch drifting in from the elementary school across from my fourth floor walk-up made me want to punch myself in the face. I curled under my covers, pretending it was a womb. One voice in my head said, “Don’t get out of bed, it isn’t worth it.” Another said: “Do you know what’s out there? Everyone is after you.” A third said, “They will eventually get you, they all want you dead.”

There was no point in getting out of bed.

This was my social anxiety disorder talking: I’d gotten the S.A.D. diagnosis after my second stay at rehab a decade ago, when I was 21. After my first rehab, as a teenager, they called it depression. During my third I was labeled bipolar. Today I live with four different diagnoses, including mild schizophrenia.

I thought about the subway. I could be pushed off a platform, stabbed or, even worse, someone might stare at me.

Eventually I emerged from under my makeshift cocoon to search for my phone. I looked at it: it was already 2. My mind had apparently kept me captive in bed for two hours. There were four missed calls from my sister, Alexandria, and a long list of text messages urging me to call her via Skype.

The mess on my couch — a pair of jeans, a tank top, a sweater and the printed pages of my class assignment — stared back at me. Another voice bloomed in my head: Did you read over your paper? You shouldn’t hand it in, it isn’t any good.

I reached for the pages — the black blocked shapes floated off the white surface. I focused on the words and tried to make them stop swirling with my eyes, like a comic book superhero with the power of telekinesis. I repeated in my head: “It’s only 2 p.m. You finished the paper. Your class is at 6. It’s only a 30-minute subway ride. You have tons of time.”

Photo
Credit Maaike Verwijs

I played some tunes on my computer — my get-ready playlist, Notorious B.I.G and Ke$ha. In the bathroom, I gazed at my mixed race, gender ambiguous reflection in the mirror: a dark skin male, high cheekbones and straight black hair with Technicolor tips. My middle finger ran along the bump on the slope of my long nose. Shaking my head, my hair slapped me in my face.

The thoughts grew louder, faster. Then a rush of anger came over me. I noticed a glimmer of a lipstick tube on the shelf nailed to the wall. I opened it and wrote “UGLY” in big bold letters on the mirror and gawked at the word as though it were written by a prophet or maybe God himself. I began to destroy my face, a little mascara here, a lot of bronzer there. Then I looked at the slew of lipsticks and glosses in the see-through container on the shelf and violently threw them on to the bathroom floor.

My body slumped and tears streamed down my face. B.I.G. and Ke$ha were gone. Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.” blared from the other room. Usually, her voice soothes me, but the song excited me. I left the mess on the bathroom floor and joined Miley in the other room as I threw my hands in the air, punching it over and over again, punching away at the voices that controlled my days. I sang along to the words, all while wearing a smile. Bipolar was a bitch.

I had been suffering like this since I was a child. I remember going to a friend’s birthday party on the Upper West Side. I was 14. I didn’t care how old she was, what sort of dress she wore or what presents she received. All I could think about was slamming, finding a working vein into which I could inject the sweet drug that muted the voices, the heroin that extinguished almost any emotion and helped me feel like everyone wasn’t judging me. In the middle of the dance floor that night I hunched over, dribbling on myself. I felt happy. I heard nothing.

Miley’s voice was interrupted by the annoying ringing of Skype. It was my sister, Alex. She asked if I’d taken my meds. I raised myself out of my chair and placed a Zoloft (depression), a Seroquel (bipolar disorder), a Klonopin (S.A.D.) and a Risperidone (schizophrenia) into my mouth, followed by the lukewarm coffee in my clean white mug.

Then Alex asked the dreaded question: “How are you doing?”

I began to cry. She asked what was wrong. “I don’t know,” I said.

She told me to calm down and breathe. It helped. She asked what time I had to go to school. I told her my class in the Village started at 6. I began to shake. Thoughts about being around people on the subway terrified me.

Alex reassured me that everything would be O.K., that I was strong and capable of jumping over the hurdles of my illnesses. She said it calmly as though she were a bored sports commentator reviewing a track meet. It was second nature to her to fill me with confidence to win my day.

At last, dressed and ready to go, in my usual all black, jeans, oversize cable knit sweater and scarf, I began to sweat. Where were my keys? One voice told me I had them in my pocket, the other said they were under my bed. I searched my bag, and there were my keys. I took a seat on my couch. I needed a moment.

When I finally made it out I locked the apartment door behind me and stood for a while in the hallway. I started thinking about the subway. I could be pushed off a platform, stabbed or, even worse, someone might stare at me.

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On the Q train, I raised the volume on my earphones, Freddy Mercury’s voice ravaged my ears and every passenger stared at me. My heart began to beat fast. I began to sweat, and the air in my throat got stuck. My head buzzed with muffled thoughts. I rushed off the train a stop early. When the sweating stopped I could breathe again, but the voices fought one another over whose fault it was that I left the subway.

I devoured an extra-long Newport before entering the building and then the elevator. On the lift up to the fifth floor, I raised the volume on my earphones so the breathing of the other passengers wouldn’t annoy me. I had 10 minutes till class.

I reached my classroom and sat down. The entire class sat around a long table, with the teacher at one end. I tried to clear the sounds from inside my skull with a breathing exercise I’d learned from my therapist the week before. A classmate sat next to me.

She looked at me.

I waited for her to say something negative.

She said, “The mix of your blue and purple hair reminds me of a peacock.” I wiped the sweat from the tip of my nose and frantically rehearsed a response in my head. Finally, I spoke.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” she said, then sealed it with a smile.

That thank you took a lot out of me. But I knew I was making progress.

(Anxiety welcomes submissions at anxiety@nytimes.com. Unfortunately, we can only notify writers whose articles have been accepted for publication.)


Adane Byron

Adane Byron studies creative writing at the New School in New York. He is currently working on a novel and a collection of poems.