catharsis_logs | Parts of my life written slightly poetically

Sometimes I get anxious and I don’t even realize it. I become nauseous, food isn’t appetizing, I feel like I’m going to faint. My body prepares for a fight or flight without my permission and I don’t even realize what’s happening. I think I must be getting sick and I might be, but the nausea mostly went away after my last presentation today. I was fine in my first presentation because I didn’t have to look at anyone, and me and my teammates were on the same page, literally, reading off the same page. The second was a little harder, completed minutes before the actual class. I went last. The entire time I had to remind myself to breathe. It was hard. The nausea was back, curling deep inside my stomach.

I listened to my groupmates give their presentations and I felt like I was on my way to another planet. An alien planet, far away from the people in the same room with me. I was on my own, hurdling in the nothingness towards unknown places, bright or dark. I told myself to breath, over and over again. I curled up a little bit, fisting a handful of the fabric in my sweatshirt and eventually just holding myself. My turn came. I snapped back from space, though still feeling distant. I talked at my professor and my mentor, my mentor mostly, because her encouraging faces were reassuring.

I stumbled over my words and at times felt like I was speaking the alien language I had learned in my short time on another planet. The planet that almost always comes out in my writing, a world covered with obfuscating mist and fantastical creatures and people walking through it, mostly unseen until they loom out of the fog like gigantic whales, and the mist adds a cushion of distance. So if I see any horrible creatures, I feel wrapped in distance. Most of the worlds in my mind are covered with fog. Small wonder.

Full body sweat, reading my flashcards in front of my peers, I feel disconnected as I recite, almost like nothing is real anymore. These aren’t people I’m talking about Switzerland to, these are statues looming out of the mist, only seen with wide astonished eyes, shaking hands, and stumbling words and the strange distance the body creates when it is completely panicked for no goddamn reason.