finding yourself in the stacks.

Good decision, I think: taking Fridays off (for applying for jobs, I tell myself).

Do you have especially neurotic days? Like, days where you actually feel crazy for a while? Like you pull back the burlap flap of your mind (or the dangling hippie beads, Choose Your Own Metaphor) and enter a territory completely out of touch with your everyday existence? I think this is supposed to be a state one can enter in meditation, but if you work in a job that requires no advanced thought, lots of solitude, and a willingness to engage solely in mindless tedium, you sometimes crawl into this mindspace.

And crawl I did, today. I got so stressed out, I considered the possibility that I might actually have (diagnosable) anxiety. I have thought about this more over the last few years; last year I went through a period over the summer of experiencing an uncontrollable rapid heartbeat, but I figured it was the coffee and it ended when I cut that out. (Odd, because I only stopped for a while and then picked it right back up again, but haven't had the rapid-heartbeat issue. Placebo effect?)

Mostly, it's because I have such intense physical reactions tied to my emotional state. I wonder sometimes if my body is not, in fact, physically oversensitive. Speaking in class, for example, will usually turn my fair-toned face an almost frightening shade of deep red. I get seriously nervous before first dates, even coffee with a new friend, and it sometimes impacts my speech (speaking too fast, mixing words). Along with the red face, of course. My face will turn red at any provocation. A presentation in front of the class--or (my worst nightmare) a skit in a foreign language--will kill me. I will be visibly terrified, and visibly trying not to be so.

There are two really frustrating aspects to my body's quick descent into anxiety.

One: much of this is a psychological condition that feeds into itself. My body thinks: this is a stressful, high-stakes situation. OMG, you know what would make it worse? If you completely forgot what you were doing. If you just went blank. Can you imagine how bad that would be? And then, there I am, staring, stunned, actually distracted by the thought that it would be a horrible time to lose my train of thought. Seriously. I cannot tell you how many times I lose track of what I am doing by becoming literally self-conscious. Suddenly only aware of the fact that I am thinking, breathing, existing. Like the concept of being is so weighty it takes up all the space in my brain for a bit. The knowledge of what there is to lose causes me to compulsively lose it. It's like if you point at a doorway and tell my brain, everything falls apart if you go through that doorway. Then I have to go through it.

(Another especially alarming thought: What words could I scream in this scenario that could completely change this situation and ruin my life? For example, you're in an interview and you say "Penis" or yell "FORKS" or say, quietly and in response to nothing in particular, "Yes." And you are almost certainly immediately not going to get the job. Your ability to damage everything--job prospects, social prospects--is that easily accessible. One word, even whispered. How frightening is that?)

The truth is, this happens a lot, even in situations that are not inherently stressful or give me much to lose, like spending down time with an old friend. I will suddenly shift into a zone of being hyper self-conscious, able to think about nothing except for the fact that I'm thinking about nothing. It's like being the outermost Russian doll, unable to access the stuff inside. Does this happen to anyone else? I would be interested in strategies for either understanding it or defeating it, preferably both.

Two: I never used to be like this. I actually adored being the center of attention as a child, being called on in class, speaking in public, putting myself on the line. And not only was I cool and calm, I was reasonably articulate, even occasionally in off-the-cuff situations. This began to falter slightly in high school, but I really lost this aspect of myself and let anxiety take over in college.

I have seen the comfortable and self-assured part of myself come through on occasion, when I seem to have a mysterious grasp on a relaxed perspective--when I can manage to care about the material far more than the superficial appearance of a situation (to which I am unusually sensitive: long, awkward silences feel painful, and I will deliberately take a different route to avoid interacting with the girl standing in front of the library who wants my credit card info to support gay rights).

For this reason, I don't necessarily think I have diagnosable anxiety. I can somehow access the part of myself that is not anxious, the part that is even a bit risky and attention-seeking. I am the baby of the family: I am naturally attention-seeking. That is not to say I hope to be completely obnoxious, but I long for a consistent comfort in high-stakes situations again.

---

In my crazy state, it became necessary to find scrap paper and a golf pencil and document the figments of thought that fluttered through my head, half-developed, and then escaped out the door. These are the couple of things I wrote over a period of about an hour, if you can follow in any way:

• "spread love like you're in the last throes of life"
• "hamster + food pellet"
• "holding in my head two conflicting scenarios"
• "no security"
• "do one thing every day that in no way resembles what you did the day before"

Understand? Yeah, there was a lot of synaptic firing in between each statement. Another thought I had at one point, is that maybe my brain is actually (by virtue of modern life and its accessories) losing the ability for sustained, deep thought. Instead it's thought-thought-thought-thought-thought, a rosary of random thoughts strung together, each only examined as long as another thought doesn't push it out of the way.

For example, the following might be a typical "train" of thought for me:

1. Mn, my contact hurts.

2. Could wear glasses.

3. Feel ugly in glasses.

4. What does this mean, that I feel ugly in glasses? Is it so important, am I that vain?

5. God, I'm vain. I only care about the way I look.

6. But doesn't everybody, kind of? Is this a big secret, is everyone equally vain? Is vanity related to actual, qualitative beauty? Would I be more vain if I were more attractive? Or is it more determined by your personality?

7. To what degree are we able to control our vanity, etc. through perspective? To what degree are we all wired the same?

8. Does wearing glasses make you a cyborg?

And on. And on. I have thoughts, but I don't sufficiently explore any of them. It feels like a fast-flowing river, as opposed to a deep one. This post only serves as an example.

And so, if we're friends, and you happen to notice that I'm being wildly inarticulate, or that I space out momentarily, here's what's going on in my brain.

(I like to theorize, generously, that it's actually going much faster than I can keep up with.)