No One Is You, No One Is Me

Anxiety is easier to diagnose when I am too fucking stoned and I can quickly think back and be like well yeah I just smoked too much and that is why I am going through this right now. Not like it makes it any less miserable or any more tolerable while it is happening. But there is at least some comfort in that knowledge — the knowledge of being too high, likely after getting too drunk, possibly on an empty stomach, and probably lacking sleep.

Where my anxiety becomes sort of fucked up is when it just pops up. Where it is less something I am able to pinpoint to a specific combination of items and more a random occurrence that doesn’t go away based on the weed I recently smoked or the alcohol I recently drank or the food that may or may not be settled in my tummy. Lack of sleep is for me kind of a way of life so I can’t blame it on that one way or another.

A few years ago it was July and for the first time in my life I dealt with paragraph number two rather than paragraph number one. It just happened one day, and it lasted for, I would say, a solid three or four months. Every day I dealt with it. It would be like a wave of ice showing up to one side of my brain or like one of my arms would feel sort of funny or I would lose feeling in my legs and all of a sudden the thought that something was wrong would creep into my brain and I couldn’t get rid of it. There were several days I legitimately believed I was going to pass out or collapse on a live game I was dealing cards on, and after awhile I just sort of had to tell myself that I work at a casino and if I die then I die, or, at the very least, if I passed out or collapsed I would get the medical attention I needed right away. These are the things I had to tell myself to feel better.

I was with my ex-girlfriend at the time and she was very self-centered in a lot of ways. Not so much when it came to our relationship — because she would drop everything and do anything for me — but more so when it came to me, specifically. What I mean by that is seemingly every time during that summer that I came down with this generic and ambiguous anxiety she would take it personally, like it was her that made me anxious, or that I didn’t want to see her or spend time with her. I tried my best to give her the reassurance she needed, to tough it out and pretend it wasn’t happening, and of course there were moments I wondered if it really was her that was making me feel as anxious as I felt, but then one day it passed and I didn’t feel it anymore.

I only write this now because it’s happening again, and I hate it. I really do. I don’t know where it came from or what it’s going to take to get over it, but I’m in it again. I’m not even smoking weed anymore. I feel it at night before I fall asleep, when I wake up in the middle of the night, when I am driving to work, when I am at work, when I am driving home from work. Nothing is the same. I feel nauseous before I eat and as I am eating. The coffee I am supposed to enjoy every morning before my shift starts only acts to give me the jitters and exacerbate matters, the cigarettes I smoke just remind me that I continue to kill myself for no reason, and the lone peace I tend to feel throughout my day occurs here, and now, as I imbibe on a few Heineken while I write words that most nights I don’t have the intestinal fortitude to even post.

The one thing I remember from a few years ago is that I listened to The Beatles like all the time. I don’t know why. Maybe it came from some childhood comfort because my dad loved The Beatles and played them all the time and there was so much familiarity from the songs and the words. I hated them when I was a child since I had such a strong disliking for oldies in general for no other reason than the fact that my dad listened to them so often. But they were my safe space back then. I did not listen to The Beatles willingly any time before that and I have not listened to them since. It’s like I used them to get me through the bad times and forgot about them when I was happy again.

It is so much me to go through bullshit like this, though. I can never just sit back and relax and think you know what this is pretty nice being here, being alive. It’s like my body and my mind take me to these dark places to remind me that I must above all things appreciate having this opportunity to breathe and to think and to make choices.

And I always make it through. I always make it out of these moments, these phases, these stages. My human experience has been flooded by an extreme white water type of current featuring highs that are unimaginably high and lows that are pretty fucking stupid. I’ve asked for nothing less, and I have gotten everything I have deserved. It has been a fair fight, between the universe and I.

During this very precarious and strange era I am now in I feel this weird need to clarify myself to those I care about. It’s less to say ‘I apologize for the way I have acted’ and more a recognition that ‘I didn’t mean it.’ The other night I was standing in the middle of a local casino with a woman I have worked with for nearly a full decade and she told me point blank that I have been an asshole but also that she knew eventually I would come back around. And I find statements like these to be kind of funny because all the while that she felt like I was being an asshole to everyone I was as happy as I have ever been. Truly. There was time there when people like her and people who have never asked me anything personal questioned if I was doing all right and asking why I had become so skinny. I hated all of these people for that. Hate is a strong word. I don’t mean actual hate. I just wonder why they never asked me how I was doing while I was happy, feeling nothing. They only notice in the times that I am not who I usually am.

The irony to it all is that usually, normally, I don’t feel anything. I don’t give a fuck about anybody most of the time. And it’s in those moments when I don’t feel anything and don’t give a fuck about anybody that everyone assumes I am happy. In that brief, small, minor, short, transient window when I felt I actually was happy, those who have known me for so long asked what was wrong with me. They won’t know. No one will ever know.

That’s why everything is backwards with me. I am now past my happiness, I have transcended it. So it probably won’t surprise you to know that nobody asks me a goddamn thing anymore. My relationships with the people who felt I was being an asshole are as strong as they have ever been, or at least back to where they were before I was happy. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but then again irony is a major part of life and some of these things don’t have to make sense.