bad bitch with anxiety

sometimes the sleep doesn't come. i almost didn't post this but that's because i'm thinking too much. written between july 2024 and january 2025.

My chest is exceptionally tight. Here I am, laying in a twin sized bed under the dim play of a booklight and I can’t quite catch my breath. Anxiety is a funny little thing, ain’t it? I don’t have the luxury of knowing where this is coming from but I must hold it. There’s not much choice. The air doesn’t keep well, all caged up, locked behind these bones. It gets all trapped and then it starts fighting its way out. One breath and then another and another.

And there the light goes.

What does an anxiety attack feel like?

Like the bottom of my feet gone cold and hot all at once. Somehow numb but pricked over with the metal teeth of a thousand nails. Like my knees knocked together and spread apart, stretched farther than my hips can bare. My heart running in circles, locked up in a spinning wheel that won’t stop. I’m caught dizzy. Fingers go like air in a moment like this. Thoughts race empty, a lot going on behind the eyes and still nothing at all. Sounds like a hollow echo ringing and ringing and ringing in my ear.

Anxiety attacks feel like my body is active water freezing over in 90 degree heat and it’s all I can do to let it ride.

Nights like these are commonplace these days. It comes with the moon. With quiet that follows a sky gone silent. Darkness brings opportunity for those festering blooms to make room for themselves. Time to crawl out of your skin.

Read a book? You can’t. Meditate on the sounds of the mountain town, the freeway off in the distance? Surely no. Fall into a deep state of rest with a cool breeze cresting over my skin. I can barely write this right now. It’s taken so much within me to find the words that touch on this. I keep pausing. My hands come up, fingerpads touching, damp with bits of sweat.

Anxiety like this is hard to press down and I wonder where it comes from.

If these nerves manifested their way down from my grandmothers. The women of my family hoarding a legacy of shivers and shallow breathing. Shirley Anne with her hands, wringing her wrists. The over and under, under and over again. Gloria with that bouncing knee, a disturbed spirit that just won’t sit still translated to my mama’s busyness right into my body. Still busy. Always going. Always going because if you stop you feel. If you stop it closes in. If you stop, it will suffocate you.

I think often on the anxieties our mothers and grandmothers and their mothers carried. How for generations it’s bubbled and rolled in the dark corners of night, never to be named. A history of refusal.

They never called it for what it was. Anxiety always has a nickname in Black households. Some colloquial placeholder. An ancestral excuse born with wisdom, masked in lineage that waxes and wanes its way through the best and worst of times. Not really a condition, more like a momentary betrayal of self. And I wonder, how many sleepless night they all had. What were the nights like when they lay, up and wired. That nauseous little kick in the belly. The ringing in their ears. I wonder how many anxiety attacks my grandmothers turned into habits they could take refuge in. Where a night of unrest turned into a big breakfast for the kids in the morning. A pot of salted and buttered grits, sizzling cuts of bacon and eggs scrambled hard. Cups of coffee, creamed down and sugared over before the sun came up. A shaky cigarette on the front porch before anyone else in the house were to wake. Phone calls to loved ones. Photographs tacked into big books, albums tracking a history of other people with undiagnosed spells ailing them behind closed doors. I wonder if it was all high functioning anxiety that wore away with age and sickness. The energy swallowed up in shaking limbs.

Grandma Shirley picking away at her face, skin falling away or tucking itself underneath her fingernails. Something crawling on her face, she says. The flies. The bugs. Those imaginary ants. Grandma Gloria talking faster than she can breathe. Hands fixed over a stove, body always limping its way out to one of her freezers to pull out some meat to cook. Mama with her phone in her hand. She can never be alone, so there must be someone she can call. Crawling up the stairs, on hands and knees so she can sit in her “lady’s den” and blow smoke out the window.

All those sleepless nights, all those tics, all those habits born from late nights like these.

If sleep would come, I’d take it right now.

It doesn’t leave. A chronic sort of anxiety, when I’m in it and beyond.

And maybe it will always be this way. At least that’s how it feels. In moments like this where I can’t catch my breath, I wonder if the feeling will ever leave. Or if history is bound to repeat itself in habits shorn up from restlessness and a discomfort I can’t quite shake.