Difference of Opinion

Anxiety ABC

I saw my counsellor again today. My mother loves me seeing her. Mizz Safire. She is blunt, tough and overly simple. Every week she reminds me that everything can be solved with a basic step by step procedure. The "ABC's of life," so she says.

"Anxiety is just the mind thinking in a complex manner. Learn to take these simple steps and your anxiety should disappear, so to speak."

She told me to write the ABC down in my journal. One per page. The titles needed to be written at the top, where there is a gap (or so it looks to me) of blank, empty thoughts, right before the lines start. It is where you stop to consider your thoughts to be like a slight blank space, before you read the real stories. The stories about surviving a deadly Ebola outbreak, travelling across deserts, seas and forests as a refugee or being the son of Michael Jackson.

Capital letter goes slightly to the left of the page. Still in the gap though. Carefully, how very carefully, must I sketch out each letter. I must press down carefully, so as not to stitch a hole through the page. But if I press too carefully, the mark will be too light, and I'll have to go over the line again, directly over it, otherwise there will be double lines. How ugly that would look. First goes the A; next page is the B; last page is the C.

"Lilly, stop that," Mizz Safire said. "Just get it down on paper."

I glanced up, slouched down on the table, with my elbows poking out. I felt like a five-year-old being told over and over, no dear, sit down and write, you can play later. Except this teacher wouldn't care if I never got to play ever again.

I stuck the pencil into my mouth, simply out of spite. It rolled against my tongue.

"Lilly..."

"I'm dowing it!" I cried.

She raised her eyebrows, gently easing her eyes up from her desk, to stare at my pencil, connected to my hand, as it moved, back and forth, creating words within the lines.

"Do you need me to repeat what acknowledgement is?"

I roughly shook my head. No, no, no. Not another lecture about how accepting something should be plain easy peasy, you know why? Because everybody knows that a fact is a fact, a fact is logical and

"You cannot change a known fact," she finished.

"What if I could?"

"You can't," she said through a fat-lipped smile. "That's why acceptance is always the easy part."

I buried my head into the paper and began to write my acceptance (because I should be so grateful that anxiety can be heard, felt and experienced).

Acknowledge:

Acknowledgement is the very act of accepting; accepting that I am a twenty-five-year-old single woman suffering from anxiety. Acknowledgement is the easy step. It is logical, a known fact that we cannot change. The sun shines, the night is dark, we are bound by time. But if I said it was 1pm in the middle of the night, the night would be my day and the day would be my night. I would live, dwell, in a dark world, but the night would still remain the world's night, the day the world's day. But what if I want to exist under the thick moon, covering the blinding light, what if I want to proclaim that the day is dark, because even then, human breath doesn't cut off, time doesn't stay in a single hour, an exact minute, until the light appears again, no, life doesn't stop during the later, quieter part of the day. I can proclaim the night as 'the quiet day', because it is easier to exist where no one can see you, where no one can hear your outbursts, where no one can sense your uneasy shift in posture.

My name is Lilly. I am a twenty-five-year-old woman. I suffer from anxiety.

"That was long," Mizz Safire said, madly tapping on the curve of the table. She readjusted the fat glasses on her nose. "You only needed to write a sentence or two."