Words

This post originally appeared on medium.com/@kannarkk before I consolidated my writing here.

“Stop! Cut it out. Cut it out, damn it!” I whisper amidst heavy breathing and palpable heartbeat. A second more, and it seemed like the heart would explode. The smile of a student waiting to explain his solution took my mind off things during that office hour.

But, it returned, stronger and deadlier later in the evening. I felt no way out of the mess I seemed to have created for myself. I visualized a shut door, albeit in reality it was not. I dreaded the shut door; I felt the world turn grey within, despite a charming weather outside. I felt the vicarious intensity in the emotions of this imaginary person seeing the slamming door. This time I couldn’t cut it out — I was back in my room, too enervated to walk out, burdened by a swarm of thoughts. I crashed out on my bed.

I woke up sometime later to feel a release in pressure, but it felt temporary. The pressure seemed to rise. I felt helpless until my good friend decided to meet for dinner. We talked it out and I felt better as things cleared up.

In both cases, the trigger were words. Nothing insulting, or demeaning, or crazy. Simple words that made me feel helpless, lost, and powerless; it were as though I suddenly lost all of 100 lives at once. The person uttering those words wasn’t disrespectful. It didn’t matter; It twisted my sense of my world and all hell break loose.

And words indeed also brought it back to normality. The context was different. The zone was one of comfort zone. The person was a familiar face whom I had grown up with.

This was yesterday. The set of highs and lows had brought an acute sense of focus later on, as though the steering was set to the right direction, the focus regained having just let out all the roiling stupidity you are grappling within your mind.

This fits more into a diary than a research journal entry cataloguing my experiences. However, I feel far more comfortable putting it out there (as a one off case) The quarter has been ripples of panic that seem to cripple me at times, but each time I felt talking to someone who knows me well helped.