There is an indescribable feeling I encounter from time to time, where I feel engulfed in emotion and it comes in the idea of a drowning of colors that I cannot see beyond. I am unable to put into words the feeling – the over-stimulation of senses that are only agitated further by excess company or outside stresses. Sometimes I wish to curl in a ball and cocoon myself in hopes of coming out from under it refreshed. I know, however, this method doesn’t work for me, and as an alternative I force myself into the world in order to fight a wave with another wave of social activity. When I’m like this, I feel alone, regardless of the company around me. I feel vulnerable and although I am completely aware I’m not the only one who experiences this type of anxiety, I still feel as if someone who peered inside of me would run from the chaos. I try to use my words and find no solace in vocalizing something that I can’t even put an idea to. Rather, I try to identify what made me feel this way and tackle it, and regain control over what is mine.

Lately, this force has been running through my being in a way that I can’t describe. A darkness where I am sometimes afraid to reflect inward, unsure of what I will see. Anxiety comes in many forms. And this is mine.

This evening I dreamed. I was wandering amongst winding brick buildings, windows shattered, leaning from side to side, courtyards that I could only imagine were once beautiful and full of life now barren save piles of rust and junk and death. This maze was intimidating and at the same time, I walked as if being led by natural instinct; as if I already knew where I was. I knew that once the sun went down I had to leave, because the dangers in this dark place were ones I was certain I did not want to encounter. I made my way through this lonely space, gazing up at the building that gave up and were given up on. The sun began to disappear.

My heart rate increased as I turned on my heels and attempted to make my way past the weaving piles of discarded, unwanted items that once served purpose in lives of those who were no longer around. The silence was only interrupted by the sound of my own heart in my ears and the occasional tipping of trash as I stumbled and stumbled and then became completely engulfed in the darkness.

Seeming to give up on myself in the current predicament, I stopped running. I now carefully treaded as I made my way to the exit that I seemed to already know, when a dark figure stepped in my path. Tall, thin, and imposing, it reached out and wrapped its arms around me and pulled me with it up against a brick wall. I felt my face press into this black shadowed figure and thought of all the other times I was haunted by beings similar to this. I tried to reason with it, to convince it to let me go. I said I both knew what we were capable of, and that if it let go of my body we would both run, and no one would be hurt. It released me. I didn’t stop to look back, and didn’t have to, because I could hear this thing running at me with a gait twice the size of mine, so I pushed twice as fast to escape it and get out of this maze of darkness and death before it caught up to me.

I ran into a lit hallway and took shelter in an alcove and waited. The being, now exposed to the light, made me embarrassed and sad. It was yellow. It was completely yellow, non-threatening, and I now thought that it was embracing me not for malicious intent. Rather than face it, I blended into a crowd and continued on.

****

I woke up and concluded that the maze and the darkness was my anxiety, and I maneuvered it so well, because it is something I have stood up against over and over throughout the years of my life where all of these colors and emotions would swallow me into a black nothingness, and I’d have to find my way out. The yellow figure was hope. It was positivity. It was a shred of myself that came into the darkness to embrace me and protect me and I ran to escape it, because I couldn’t see it head-on for what it was. In life, I can’t always see head-on the things that will protect me in my darkness. In life, if I embraced that darkness, rather than try to escape it, and calmly step through what is seemingly ruins, I might be encountered by the things that will save me.