START OF TIME: THE LOVE STORY OF AN ANXIETY-RIDDEN FAILURE AND HER OWN LITTLE SUNSPOT // ALLISON CLARK

Anxiety is not a passive demon. It does not always sit in the back of my mind whispering to me that I am failing, that I am unwanted, unloved, and obnoxious. Sometimes it contents itself with the whispers, the memories of my past mistakes that replay on a constant loop, and sometimes it needs more. Sometimes, like the old gods, the ancient ones of legends and epics, it demands blood and pain and sacrifice to sate its vengeance and its fury, and even then it can demand more. Anxiety is a fickle god, and even with sacrifice and blood it may choose to wreak havoc all the same. It is a vicious demon, an active poltergeist, that sinks its claws into my heart and soul and mind and it refuses to let go until it has sucked every ounce of self-esteem from my bones and spat it back into me as self-loathing vomit.

I was eight when I first discovered that failure tasted like blood in my mouth and made my heart push against my lungs and my ribs, straining against my skin suddenly too tight and too loose all at the same time. It made my stomach clench into knots and settle somewhere between my esophagus and the top of my collarbone, making breathing almost impossible. As the world around me pounded in my earlobes, screaming through my brain, ripping my skull apart, I let myself cry. As the self-loathing turned my bones into tears, turned my heart to a stone, and washed my face with sobs of pain, I let myself weep. I let the salt and the warmth of tears wash the blood from my mouth, soothe my heart until it beat to the pace I was used to; let them push my stomach back into place, and force my breathing from deep shuddering gasps into shallow copies of the normal, unconscious in-out.

I was eight when I discovered that crying only made it worse. It brought my father and my mother to my side, had my best friends clinging to me like restrictive, if well-meaning, baby sloths to whom I'd only have to recount my failures and explain my mistakes all over again. That only brought the blood back into my mouth, my heart back against my skin and my bones, my stomach rising like bile. I lost the ability to breathe.

So I stopped crying.

I was thirteen when I discovered that exhaustion was a living, breathing beast that stalked me through the halls, prowling just out of eyesight, until I stumbled into one too many commitments and clubs and friendships. It would pounce, and maul, and devour until I was nothing but a splitting headache and the bleary knowledge that if I did not make it back to my bed, I would collapse on the living room coffee table in the middle of dinner and my family's nightly M*A*S*H marathons.

At fourteen, I began to imagine myself as small and insignificant: a drop of water running down a mountainside. Against the ocean's morning tide, I was nothing important, nothing strong, nothing necessary. I did not matter in the long run because I was not anyone's foundational support. I was not the kind of person that people deified, loved, sacrificed for. It was those thoughts that would hold the blood at bay and keep my heart in place and hold my stomach down and keep me breathing.

I discovered that if I could convince myself that I didn't matter, the failure couldn't hurt me.

At sixteen I learned how to organize weekend retreats, homework, friends, and family so that instead of collapsing with exhaustion, I could simply get the work done. I found that if I got at least four hours of sleep during the week and six on the weekends, I had just enough time to get everything done. If I kept to my schedule, the exhaustion was kept at bay just long enough, just far enough away (if I kept to the schedule, if I kept to the schedule, I kept to the schedule, I kept the schedule, I the schedule), and yet all the while my straining heart threatened to beat its way free of my ribs, free of the black, gooping vomit of self-loathing that drowned it, forced it to work double the time it was paid for, all to keep me alive.

I was nineteen when I gave in, let myself be consumed, let myself acknowledge that I would only ever fail because how could someone so insignificant, incompetent, and idiotic be anywhere near the perfection that was demanded? I ripped my schedule to shreds, (I ripped my schedule to shreds, I ripped my schedule to shreds, I ripped my schedule, I ripped, I ripped myself to shreds) let myself slip into day- long naps where I would dream that somehow things would be alright – and yet, I always woke to the knowledge that it wouldn't ever be okay. I was not perfect, I could not be perfect, yet I had to be perfect.

And my demons stalked me all the while, just out of sight and just out of reach. Like ghosts they circled, waiting for a weakness in my armor, and sometimes, I could feel the headache in the back of my head or taste the blood in the back of my mouth and I knew they'd come too close and sunk in their fangs and claws.

I was drowning. I was losing the fight. My heart was racing. I was forgetting how to breathe. The sun never rose in the darkness I barely saw or acknowledged.

I was twenty when the sun came out.

He walked into the darkness I'd learned to accept as perpetual and shone starlight and sunspots into every corner, every shadow. With words spoken soft and calm, concern etched in solutions not just suggestions, he broke like the sunrise against the prowling ghosts that threatened to drown me in failures and sleepless nights. The taste of blood was replaced by him; if my heart still beat too loudly against my ribs and my chest, I learned that it was alright because I could feel his doing the same; my stomach didn't rise like bile so much as it flipped and knotted, surrounded by butterflies every time I saw him smile. If I ever stopped breathing, it was easy to find the way back because it was right there in the simple rise and fall of his chest, the in and out of his breath against my neck.

The headaches, and the muffled vision, and the bone deep ache in my limbs were all forgotten. The prowling beasts of exhaustion stopped threatening me around every corner and tree because with his arms around me, centering me, I learned how to sleep in peace.

I learned how to dream in starlight, not in empty black space. I learned that thinking of the future could mean imagining more than demons and ghosts and claws and teeth and pain. I thought of sailing the sheets of hotel beds like uncharted seas and waking every time to the same messy hair and crooked, lazy smile. I thought of backyard barbeques with friends and stolen kisses between blow-backs and beers, of nights spent drinking away the nighttime sadness, of mapping out the constellations that I'd learned to create in our heads - our own personal celestial skyscapes hung just beyond our eyes and almost out of reach.

He scattered stars across the black, dark night in my bones and when I kissed him all I tasted was sunlight.

I learned that watching the seasons change bit by bit could be more than watching life I never felt and a death I could never mourn. I could watch the springtime grow across my skin beneath his touch, feel the summer in his arms beneath the green lush of the heat and the growth, feel the winter with the bone-white snow beneath my feet, and for the first time, think that maybe it wouldn't be so bad watching the world drift to sleep if I could kiss the cold from his lips.

At twenty, I stopped imaging myself as nothing. How could I be insignificant when this boy who could spin the stars across my heart, whisper supernovas into my soul, and burn the self-loathing vomit from my body with his smile like a sunrise, love me like I was everything?

At twenty, the sun came out, and I fell in love.