The Bad Energy – What it really feels like to suffer with anxiety.

Anxiety is a feeling that has it’s hold over me so often these days, I can honestly hold my  hands up and say that it is one of the only ‘feelings’ I harvester that makes me scared out of my wit.

I have, many times, described the feeling I hold as a feeling of ‘Doom’. Just that single noun, as there is no other assortment of letters I can extract from my mind that has given it as much justice. That saying, it is not a feeling that can be described in just a single word. How do you describe such a powerful surge of emotion in something so static?

When my anxiety decides to knock on my door and uninvitingly barge it’s way in to my confort zone, from my inner bubble of family and friends I always get the conventional;

1. What are you thinking about?
2. Why are you worrying?
3. Just shrug it off!

The three of them, taken in to account, has lead to a passing conclusion many times in my mind, that my Bipolar anxiety might not actually be what is eugenically known as the term ‘Anxiety’ in general. Maybe it is something else altogether, seperate from what others – my family, my friends, my many many therapists see as Anxiety.

And from the ashes of these paranoid indiffering thoughts, I started coming up with the term ‘The Bad Energy’. The Bad Energy, is in face not anxiety, and cannot be explained in terms of anxiety, but is something else altogether.

Crazy thought, right?

If I look up the word anxiety in the Oxford dictionary I get this as a first term;

1. A feeling of worry, nervousness or unease about something with an uncertain outcome: ‘he felt a surge of anxiety.‘
   

Let’s take a moment to analyse this.

A feeling of worry.

Definately not. This is not the horrible ‘doom’ defying feeling I feel – at all – as my anxiety is illogical. I usually carry out my days (if not sunken down by depression) more on the optimistic side of life. I am not worrying about anything, and if there was one answer to put a halt to this dreadful feeling, and the solution to it was to simply stop worrying about the topic at manner then trust me; i’d fucking stop worrying.

Does my ‘bad energy’ come up when I sit there with my bills in front of me wondering whether i’m going to make this month’s rent up? A sickly feeling yes, but not ‘anxiety’.

Does my ‘bad energy’ arise when I have a job interview, an exam, a test of some sort? A niggly nervousness (see quote) yes, but not the anxiety I am accustom to.

Now, has my ‘bad energy’ come up when I have been shopping at my local pondering over what sort of milk top to put in my basket? It has. Had my ‘bad energy’ come about when I have been driving in my car, windows down, singing along to a playlist on a nice sunny day? It has, quite frequently. Has my ‘bad energy’ come about having  a lighthearted random conversation over a coffee with a close friend? It most certainly has.

To call it a feeling derived from ‘worrying’ is incomprehensively flawed in my case. This is the reason I get so worked up when people ask me what I am thinking about and/or why I am worrying. I am not. It just is. You don’t blame the presence of a stone on ‘being’ there because of the person next to it worrying about it or because you thought the stone up in your mind now do you? It’s just there.

Nervousness.

Yeah, I get this one. There are a few butterflies flapping about (-although, I have described it once upon a time to my therapist as it more like being black heavy moths of lead flapping about viciously; with little tiny razor blades on their wings), maybe but we come back to the ultimate question again; what are you nervous about? Absolutely nothing.

Unease.

Okay this is more like it. That might be where the ‘Doom’ description came from. Unease, I do feel. If you count feeling uneasy as feeling like you have been repeatedly been whacked with a sack of bricks.

I suppose there is some sort of truth in the unease about something with a certain outcome. But people don’t even consider that when it comes to the term anxiety do they?

“What are you worrying about?”

So here is my shot at attempting to make up my own definition of what this anxiety/bad energy/razor moth doom feels like, in a hope to shed some light in to people who can’t seem to grasp the concept…

Imagine you are skipping along happily on a great sunny day. Let’s make it better than great, maybe it began on an unexpected Monday morning where you got a phonecall from your boss and he randomly gives you a day off. You are free in life enjoying yourself, with no where to go, no responsibilities to take care of, indulging in the sweet notes of upbeat music playing in the air and minding your own business when –

Darkness engulfs you. There is empty space all around you, and you cannot see a thing. It is pitch black, empty and cold. You don’t even know if you are standing upright, or which direction you are facing, because all you can feel is the space of the unknown around you in the blackness. Your instinct is screaming at you to run, but you are stuck there with no sense of direction. Your skin starts to crawl, and you get a creeping feeling that something is about to happen. Something is going to jump out at you. But you can’t see, or feel or hear any sounds. Yet you know something is there, waiting for you in the shadows. Then, ever so slowly – so slow that is is barely noticable at first – you feel a faint breeze on the back of your neck. You are hit with a sudden shock of terror when you come to the realisation that something sinister, your worst fear, is breathing its hot sticky breath beneath your hairline.

Now take that fear of yours, and materialise it.. It can be anything, from a pit full of sharp needles you are about to fall in to, from a ledge off the tallest building you can imagine. From the darkness, you abruptly see that slap bang in front of you – your breath pauses from the shock of it appearing right there in your face. Then you realise you are at that pivital point of no return, the point where the weight of your body tipples over the balance off the edge of the ledge, the one where your brain says ‘NO’ and your heart stops beating. Keep that fear. Imagine it. That very moment of terror that makes time stop. Freeze it.

Now with that that fear, that horrible electrically charged surge of emotion, turn it dark. Turn it sour, almost to the point it is painful and sharp. More. Even more. Realy fight to make it as nasty and as vicious as you can.

Now compress it. Compress that fear, and squeeze all that evergy in to the tightest space you can. Feel it increase in weight, feel how heavy it feels in your hands, like a big hot ballbearing. All that dense black energy all tight in one space, ready to explode.

Now put that nasty ball of compressed energy in to your heart. Feel your back bend over and your muscles in your body squeeze and tense up with the weight, your heart still stuck in time paused on one beat, aching with the pain. There are no thoughts, no way out of it, your mind can’t even possibly register an explaination of why this is happening – your brain is still paralysed in that singular moment with the fear of the shock, remember? Your breath still held on that one last breath.

Now carry that around all day.

And then, you sense someone who is still in that distant parallel universe where the sun is still shining, and the music is still playing, and they look over at you and ask;

“What are you worrying about?”

Maybe i’m not the crazy one after all. Maybe I am not the one who is indifferent. And maybe, more people in this world need to look up what Anxiety actually means, rather than this globally passive term of ‘worrying’ that people assume it is.