Relax.
You need to take five deep breaths. In through the nose and out through the mouth. When you are done I will need you to sit down on that couch over there. You can cross your legs if you want to, or you can tuck your knees under your body- I don’t care, I just need you to sit, and relax.
Are you ready?
Okay, five deep breaths, in through the nose
and out through the mouth.
in through the nose,
and out through the mouth,
in through the nose,
and out through the mouth,
in through the nose,
and out through the mouth,
in through the nose,
and out through the mouth.
Good, feel better now? Lets talk.
You are feeling anxious because there is so much going on right now. You wake up in bad moods and don’t know why- really you have nothing to be that upset about. You are twenty something, in school, in love, and have a roof over your head and can afford to eat out 3.5 times a week. You drag yourself out of bed and make coffee, you said that a cup of coffee can make you feel better. So you drink your cup of coffee and then what?
Then you go to school, or work or your friends house to smoke a joint, have a beer? Right?
Right. But this is just the external anxiety. There are layers and layers to this kind of phobia. Isn’t it interesting how ‘stress’ is a phenomenon only a bit older than we are? Stress and anxiety were only upper class afflictions. Nervous tendencies left to the rich unsexed wives of the Victorian era. But now you need to worry about charging your phone, transferring that paper to the jump drive, making sure the e-mail you sent to your boss/mom/teacher/boyfriend went through. You are not sure if you are going to have enough money to pay rent and go to the beach for the weekend. You are stressed because yesterday you got a parking ticket and lost your bus pass. You got to drunk and spent more than you wanted to at the bar.
That’s enough to stress anyone out as is.
But what else?
You should feel lucky that you can even worry about these things. Most people have to worry about how they are going to put dinner on the table for their 6 kids, where they are going to sleep tonight, if the bus they board is going to blow up, or if they will make it through the night while deep inside them a cancer grows.
No, I know you are not ungrateful for what you have, and I know you donate money and help out where ever you can… please calm down.
Lets take a few more breaths okay? In through the nose,
and out through the mouth,
in through the nose,
and out through the mouth,
in through the nose,
and out through the mouth.
Excellent. Close your eyes if you need to.
It seems to me that this is all the normal problems every college student has. Yours is different, I know. You are gay/black/bi-polar/poor. I know. And for that I am very sorry, but to be honest you are the only one who seems to think you are so different. You are anxious about the same things mostly and the reality is that you just have too much on your plate. Five classes which take you an hour to commute to, you have a full time job and a live in other. Your mother is slowly declining into insanity and your father is battling cancer/MS/PTSD/alcoholism. You live in the shadow of your perfect siblings and you are the art school outcast. You have the responsibility of a job you hate, of playing mother and father at the same time and no, I’m not sure why you wanted to adopt that puppy too…
Excuse me?
…
The apocalypse? My.
Well, yes… The world is grossly over populated, and disease is more rampant than ever. In fact, between our food and all its high-fructose corn syrup, added sodium, msg, we are killing ourselves with obesity. The amount of people on this earth make it hard for us to not infect each other. There is war waging everywhere. The big earthquake seems to be laying dormant, un-touched and ready to rise at any minute, creeping its shingled splintered skin to the top and belching out in a single roaring thrust only to open it’s mouth and consume us whole. This morning there was a small one.
It seems that corruption and evil has overthrown all good and now there is no such thing as right and wrong, only political and anarchy, but anarchy does no good because it is a hopeless cause so now we must all drudge along single line, cut nails, hair parted at 2 o’clock thank you very much, and do your blacks match? because if they don’t…
so we are coasting on this capitol hungry wave until what?
Right. Until it all crumbles, and at this acceleration it is making the bogus 2012 predictions seem a lot more true. We are slowly tuning our ears to pick up on more of the weird. Last night for example I was sleeping next to my girlfriend, her twin sister and best friend in the next room. While we were making love I had a waking hallucination of flowers growing up up up from pots and blooming then shriveling back, the room was stark white and the flowers were made of stop animation paper. She confessed to me that while we were making love she had a bizarre “dreamy thing although I was awake” in which we vacationed in the Caribbean and in our cabana a woman with her face painted purple and green hair appeared. This morning her twin began to tell us of “the weirdest thing ever that happened last night as I was going to bed…” She hallucinated red demon faces screaming and swirling above her, while next to her, her friend closed her eyes and saw a woman sitting in a chair in the hallway. All of this at the same time, unconnected to anything, no one speaking to anyone else and far far away above the mid-Atlantic a bright green meteor streaked across the sky lighting it up and departing with a sonic boom. * Heads from Virginia, DC, and Maryland turned upwards and asked “why?” The meteorologists smiled in their stiff suits, scratching their head and said that this streak was “nothing meteorological that we can see.” And no it wasn’t meteorological because above his head and high above ours and above me in my sleeping bed, above DC and Virginia, above that green streaking flame, planets switch shifts like ticking clock grind gears. The moon moved seamlessly and silently into Gemini’s house, ready to assume his power.
North Korea is going to launch a missile soon. They say it is only practice. The situation in the middle east is at it’s worst, and the mall in Haifa that we could see from our house was almost blown up yesterday- they found a car packed with enough explosives to destroy 5 bus loads of Israeli’s. Haiti is falling apart, communism is not an idea of yesterday. AIDS has morphed into super AIDS and the mob has destroyed Italy. Racism is still a big deal in South Africa but anywhere if you have a large bill the people who can do anything will turn their back and say nothing. We have no control. We have no faith in future.
What I need you to do is sit down and cross your legs. Those dreams you keep having about the water rising is only in sleep, so please take a seat on my couch and we are going to do a little relaxation exercise. I want you to take five deep breaths, in through your nose,
and out through your mouth.
