HEALTH
W
hen it’s at its worst,
I hear this crescendo of shouting —
hundreds and hundreds of
indistinct, nameless, faceless Voices rising, Voices
that are only in my head. I
hear their anger and their
disgust. I hear their disappointment. Somehow I know
it’s my fault.
Anxiety is a tsunami, and
depression is a thunderstorm.
It rolls in with a heavy cloud
over my head, the world
bleached of its color and its
joy. It’s not an overwhelming
sadness; it’s emptiness. Depression is nothing. Anxiety
is everything.
I have to make it stop.
I can’t do this. I have to
make it stop.
I turn on the television,
this tiny, 24-inch monitor
I expect to solve my problems. Talking heads babble
on some news network I
don’t bother to look at.
I sit cross-legged on my twin
bed, my back bowing my
body over itself, my forearms
pressed tightly against my
biceps, tucked tight against
my head. My body knows the
drill. Duck and cover. Emergency. The world is falling
apart.
The talking heads don’t
drown out the Voices. They
only add to the cacophony of
hellish reproach in my head.
I need harmony and beautiful
noise and music.
If I can just drown it out,
I think. If I can just drown it
out, I’ll be okay.
It is all the noise I can
make and still it isn’t enough.
I want to scream. I want
to scream the too-thick poison out of my lungs and go
back to the place where the
air is clear and my head is
quiet. Instead, the whitewalled dorm room closes in
on me, and the floral blankets disappear into an infinite
darkness where only the
Voices exist.
D
epression and anxiety are a loathsome
combination. They take
my insecurities and doubts,
my fears and shortcomings,
my failures and aspirations
and hold them hostage. And
they wait for a moment when
they can flood me with it all
at once.
Mental illness manifests
differently in everyone. Many
people don’t even know they
have it. It’s something no