Since as far back as I can remember I’ve told myself the same story;
- Girl gets sick and dies from freak illness nobody ever gets
- Girl is too anxious to spend time alone; or travel, or leave the house without something to distract her mind
- Girl is too anxious to watch scary movies or shows about hospitals and sickness and pain
And exactly what you think might happen, happened. It became my story.
Is any of it true? Maybe, I don’t know anymore. But I believed it to be true and therefore it was true. So often our perception is our truth.
And I lived it. I lived this story out my whole life. Right down to the darkest corners of my mind and back I’ve played my part accordingly. And then one day I realized I was more afraid of living this story than anything else. I was more afraid of the way my life was beginning to take shape than of the illnesses I had obsessed over for 22 years. I had spent so long obsessing over these imagined illnesses than I’d failed to see I already had an illness. And it was fatal.
It was killing me from the inside out. It was taking my personality, my social life. At one point I was so anxious I couldn’t eat for days and weeks and slowly mentally and physically I began to fade away. I had that “butterfly stomach” feeling constantly, my mind consumed with the fact that I could drop dead at any moment and yet so wholly unaware of the fact that I’d been dying for a long time.
That was almost two years ago now. It’s been over a year since I had a panic attack which were at one stage a daily occurrence. And yet I do not write to you from a pedestal of epiphanies and redemption and light. I do not write to you anxiety free with a pamphlet of 5 easy steps to make you feel “normal” again.
Instead I write to you from the 5th day of a year long, worldwide trip. I write to you from a clammy room in upper Manhattan, New york city where a girl, the same girl from the first story tells herself a new story.
One where she travels the world.
One where she falls asleep without a movie on.
One where instead of reminding herself how anxious she is, she reminds herself how resilient she is. How much she’s already overcame, and how much she still has left to conquer.
One where instead of focusing on how breathless she is when she steps off the plane, she focuses on the fact that she did it anyways.
And she reminds herself that this story, this running monologue in her mind is shaping her future. That it’s shaping her.
And she gets to decide how that reads.
She gets to write it.
All my love,
Maeve x
This is breathing 