Whisper In My Ear The Secrets I Hate To Love

Nervousness

Is there ever a time your emotions are running so high upon an endless bridge leading to nowhere that the exhilaration, the exasperation is replaced with a solitude of numbness? Is there ever a time your anxiety makes you giddy, overrides your rationality, gives you courage, makes you do the things you'll live to regret? 

Nervousness is a peculiar feeling, to say the least. You know, it's strange because it can immobilise you yet force you to act upon your desires with an ambiguous yet wanton sense of spontaneity and then you're stuck to deal with the consequences and the aftermath of God knows what, you can't even remember. But it's not drunkenness, no; no one really knows what it is. You ask me to write a story about nervousness, but how is it meant to be defined? Nervousness ranges from a buzz lulling at the tip of your gut aching to be released to refusing to leaving the carpet of your house because the world scares you: as if you were institutionalised. 

Nervousness ranges from stage fright to depression, and even then it's bare and boundless beyond that.

Nervousness can have you trapped - a different setting for everyone and everything; it'll never cease to be individualistic. Nervousness can be a cage, imprisoned with manacles shackled around your throat, constricting your airways; the engulfing walls covered with scratches of desperation of failed escape; dark and dismal and claustrophobic and lugubrious and how are you meant to escape - HOW ARE YOU MEANT TO ESCAPE?!

You can't.

Your senses become blurred. You start to hear the murky acrid scent of your excessive excretion; you start to taste the whistling that circles your deteriorating mentality; you start to smell the unbalanced grounds degenerating below your very tarnished feet. And what for? The mere situations of confessing your love or coming out with the truth. The everlasting fear of rejection throws you into a pit of something worse than hell itself: anguished control. 

At least in hell you're not responsible for inflicting your own pain. 

But there's two sides of every story...is there not? 

Nervousness isn't always destructive. Far from it, really. Nervousness of people, of the same species can you leave you trembling in fear of what to say and what to do - nervousness can take the form of excitement. It can leave you looking forward to the leaves of the aged trees descending onto the concrete smothered with the cries of the sky on an Autumn afternoon, it can leave you immersed in the colourful distractions that whizz by you in front of your discombobulated eyes. Nervousness doesn't have to trap you nor restrict you, it can set you free of your comfort zone, leave you awkward and confused at your own persistence and courage, and abandon you in a serendipitous desolation. 

Your senses become blurred. You start to hear the deliciousness of a ripe apple tearing away from your teeth as if you were a predator; you start to taste the elation that overthrows the negativity, the insecurities, the doubts that try to attack; you start to smell the light, weightless footsteps that grace the cracks and potholes encompassing the ground beneath. And what for? The mere situations of delivering a speech you have an infatuated passion for or spending time with the ones you love. The everlasting fear of blunder throws you into a pit of something better than providence: felicitous fortuity. 

All this being said, nervousness isn't a metaphysical being suppressing and oppressing everything else in its entirety. It can't be. It's merely one feeling in a universe of many others and regardless of how many metaphors you use to describe it, to hyperbolise its name, that's all it is. It impacts one person differently from the next, whether it be detrimentally, beneficially or just existent. 

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Oh, you wanted me to write about a time I was nervous? Apologies, but nervousness isn't a story, it's a reality that can't be pinpointed into its epitome: it's endless.