Being an adult

The stress and the anxiety hit its absolute peak around three weeks after her birthday. She was panicking every single day, she was showering three times a day in fear of flesh eating bacteria and she was becoming obsessive with how many steps it took her to get to uni. It would be a bad day if it wasn’t 632 steps. She was so scared and so on edge. She sat down in her classes and refused to look or talk to anyone. She threw herself into her assignments to the point where she would be doing twelve hour days but still her grades didn’t improve. That was when the self doubt set in.

And all she kept doing was smiling and laughing and trying to pretend that their was no fear in her heart and no paranoia rattling around in her brain where in fact these two feelings had become daily companions, much like her shadow, they were something she couldn’t escape unless she was in complete darkness.

To her, fear and anxiety were the same. She was anxious about something so therefore she feared it. She feared something so therefore it made her anxious. The doctor had prescribed her pills however she fear taking them, she feared they would take over her mind and stop her from being herself. All he kept asking was ‘are you taking your pills?’. Maybe he should have asked ‘why don’t you want to take your pills?’.

Eventually she refused to leave bed. She spent four days lying in bed on her laptop watching pointless, shitty fox comedies that made her cringe but she loved getting wrapped into their beautiful world which seemed to lack danger. The real world had so much danger and so much stress and it all screamed so loudly at her. She just wanted to break through the static and find the truth. ‘The truth’ was her obsession. She craved it, all around her was lies and betrayal, and it was so easy to lie! How could you know if someone was lying! How did you know???? She lied to him, told him she was fine then she told him she was sick but with a tummy bug. He came around the day she told him she was sick and lay in bed and they watched shitty comedies together and he asked how her tummy was. Somehow this simple lie allowed her to leave bed the next day. It was just a tummy bug. That’s all she told people. They made sympathetic noises and gave her copies of their notes. How easy it was for her to hide the truth. Everyone must hide their truths. This is called being an ‘adult’.

Hide the fact that you are missing someone.

Hide the thoughts.

Hide the feelings.

Hide it all.

Hide who you are.

And then all she could think about was what kind of truths were people hiding? So she focussed, really focussed on others, she watched how they talked, how they walked, how they held their pens, how they did their hair. Nothing gave them away. That was until she started talking, opening up a little about her own truth. First she told the older girl that she had panic attacks. “Oh, my brother had that before he came out of the closet”. Second she told her work friend that she had lost her best friend in a car accident two years before. “My little sister passed away from meningitis when she was six” she replied.

The truth wasn’t so much needed in day to day life but rather it was more the truth of an identity, the truth behind why they talked that way, walked that way, held their pens that way and did their hair that way. All these past events could stay hidden away but would always be a personal truth, a defining feature, the one thing you held back until you trusted someone. She had to learn that, she had a few truths that she needed to learn to keep closer to her rather than broadcasting them. That was called being an adult.