The first memories are from early age, it presented itself differently over the years, but in a way, it was always there.

The inability to sleep after a slightly more exciting day, the array of dreams with intricate stories that filled your days almost as much as your nights, the eagerness to belong, to achieve, to go further.

The way you’d imagined yourself in life threatening situations, in grief, in pain, always trying to make sense of a world you didn’t know, always trying to be two steps ahead, always trying to be prepared for the unpredictable. As if study life events would make you more human, more capable of integrating a world you often didn’t feel you belonged to.

It came early, that sense of living a misplaced life. Often nothing was particularly wrong, but nothing was ever exactly right either, it was always this limbo. You’ve always lived half in your head and half in the real world, and at times that line became dangerously thin.  

The headaches started even before you could read, to a degree that made them test you, but they found nothing wrong. The anxiety came shortly after, though you didn’t really know what that was. Its first showings were regarding other people, or your inability to distance yourself from their emotions, and all the sudden you were carrying a sense of worry that never left.

Maybe because you’d practice so well in your dreams, you were never given to big spontaneous proclamations of emotion, so it was hard to grasp the intensity of other people’s feelings, and even harder not to be affected by it. Quickly, the fear of not being there when needed became a reality that had come to stay, it became an obsession, you became so afraid of not noticing if someone needed help that often you made things became bigger than they really were.

You were always very realistic when it came to fixings, you always knew you couldn’t take people’s pain away, so it’s hard to know if all this attention to people’s pain was selfless or just a distraction from your own feelings.

But anxiety, it seemed, had more than one trigger, and soon it became also about yourself. Anything less than perfection was not enough. It’s hard to say if it was environmental, because you don’t ever remember being pushed by anyone than yourself, but that’s when the tightness in your chest and the heavy breathing began to be a part of your life.  

You started noticing little things, how, in any environment you’d prefer to be in a corner, so you could see, from every angle, what was going on around you. How involuntary changes to your routine, or habits you were unaware you were repeating, triggered an irrational sense of discomfort. How crowded places, noises or intermittent lights swiftly altered your mood.

Nights out with friends were not fun, because often the noise was unbearable, concerts and music festivals were only fun when we’d get to stay backstage, because the crowds made you feel unease, going to the movies was torture because it was unsettling to stay put for that long, school was painful because you felt constantly evaluated and even hobbies became harder to enjoy.

It didn’t take long to realize that the more tired you were the easier it was to feel sensory overloaded, there was a clear connection between your lack of sleep and your ability to cope with the world. But that knowledge doesn’t help much when you can’t shut your brain off or pause the world. Ironically, the less you’d sleep the more you’d brain would speed up.

The energy it would take to just be normal was so draining, that didn’t leave room for much else, which led to apathy, guilt, lack or purpose and eventually depression.

You’d find solace in the quiet of the night, when there were no lights, no sounds, no people, thought it always felt too short.

The morning always came to soon and with it, the weight of a life you couldn’t carry, but had no choice but face, day after day.

Everything was a challenge, everything felt like a life-or-death situation, even if you knew it weren’t. To an outsider it may feel overdramatic, but regardless the logic of those thoughts, that’s how it felt. It’s always been one the most annoying things about yourself, perhaps, THE most annoying, this egotistical side to you, this knowledge of knowing we are nothing in this big world and at the same time feel like all eyes are on you, that you can’t fail or everything will fall apart.

So, you tame your emotions and your feelings, your thoughts and your struggles, and you do it for so long that you don’t even notice it anymore. You become good at reading other people’s feelings when you can barely identify your own because you’ve been numbing them for so long. The thing is, you can’t fully live if you always keep on foot outside of the door. You can not selectively numb emotions, if you numb the bad emotions, you numb the good ones too.