Poems About Anxiety

It starts before you wake. Somehow it's already there— sitting on your chest like a guest who arrived while you were sleeping and doesn't plan to leave. You know this weight. It has a name you don't say out loud because saying it makes it real and you've been very good at pretending it isn't. Depression is not sadness. Sadness has a reason. Depression is the weather that happens inside a room with all the windows shut. People say: go outside. People say: exercise. People say: have you tried not feeling this way? People are very creative with their uselessness. The hardest part is not the darkness. The hardest part is the performance— the smile that takes four muscles and all your energy. The voice that says: I'm fine, while the rest of you is screaming in a frequency no one can hear. I'm not going to fix you with a poem. A poem is not medicine. A poem is someone in the next room knocking on the wall and saying: I'm here too. Does that help? Maybe. Maybe not. But the knocking is the point. You are not lazy. You are not broken. You are carrying something heavy with no handles and no one has taught you how to put it down. But you can. Slowly. With help. With time. With the radical act of believing that the version of you that exists on the other side of this is worth walking toward.

This poem is not going to pretend it knows what you're feeling. It doesn't. But it knows you're still reading, which means you're still here, which means the part of you that wants to stay is still louder than the part that doesn't. Listen to that part. It's small right now. It's a whisper in a room that's full of shouting. But it's there. And it's right. The darkness is lying to you. It's telling you the world is better without you in it. But the darkness doesn't know about the person who will need you next Tuesday. Or the laugh you haven't laughed yet. Or the morning— some ordinary morning— when the light will come through the window at exactly the right angle and something in you will say: oh. There it is. There's the reason. You don't have to see it now. You just have to get to that morning. Call someone. Anyone. The number is: 988. Three digits. That's all it takes to let someone else hold the weight for a minute while you catch your breath. You are not a burden. You are a person having the hardest time of their life and that is not the same thing. Stay. Not forever. Just tonight. And then tomorrow night. And then the one after that. Stack the nights. They become weeks. The weeks become the distance between you and the worst moment. And distance is the beginning of healing. Please. Stay.

My brain has no off switch. I've looked. It runs at 3 a.m. the way some people run marathons— without purpose, without destination, just the relentless forward motion of a mind that has confused movement with progress. Anxiety is not worry. Worry has a subject. Worry is: did I lock the door? Anxiety is: what if everything? All at once? Forever? It lives in the chest. Not the heart— slightly above, slightly to the left, in the place where your breath would go if your breath would cooperate. People say: just relax. This is like saying to a person on fire: have you considered being less flammable? I have tried the breathing. I have tried the apps. I have tried the supplements with names I can't pronounce and promises that sound like poetry if poetry were sold at a pharmacy. Some days it's manageable. A low hum. A radio station playing in another room that you can almost ignore. Other days it's the only station. Loud. Every channel. And the remote is missing. But here's what I've learned: the wave always passes. Always. Even the ones that feel like drowning. You float. You breathe. You wait. And the water remembers how to be still. You are not your anxiety. You are the person still here after it passes. That person is braver than they know.