The Art of Learning to Breathe

P r o l o g u e

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Everyone has fears, something that completely terrifies them. Some fear clowns, some of heights or some of death. I am not scared of any of that - not spiders, not snakes, or the dark. What truly makes my eyes take on a sheen of water, my heart to race as if it was a car, speeding at what seems like a hundred miles per hour and my face to take the colour of the white chalk I once played with on the playground when fears were just the imaginary monsters I would see and hear in my head. What scares me are people. Small people, large people, quiet people, loud people, nice people, mean people, insane people, normal people – they are all daunting. Every single one of them.

Over the course of the seventeen years I have been around, I've learned a thing or two. One being this, life is like a game of chess and the people are the pieces we play with. There is the white team and the black. There's the Kings and the Queens, the Rooks and the Bishops, the Knights, and the Pawns. We all occur to be one of the six in the game where strategy is the key.

The way I see people is unpredictable, just like the chess pieces. You don't know when your opponent will strike their move and hit you, destroy you and then you're out. Gone, completely. Then, you're one piece closer to losing. In this case, losing against ourselves, against life, against our opponents. In the simplest, people are unforeseeable. Even myself, or should I say... my inner self. My inner demons. Everyone has them. The little voices inside your head that learn to eat you alive. Well, in my case they do. Some go insane from them, some learn to live with them and some simply just ignore them.

It's called anxiety, a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome. However, infancy and more appropriate terms, I would much rather name it a disorder. Anxiety itself is just a feeling, everybody gets it. Even the strongest of them all. However, anxiety disorder is a complete other story. One people seem to misunderstand way too often. It's one group of the many mental illnesses there is out there where symptoms are only the beginning. It's not just the feeling of unease, it's everything in one: worry, guilt, panic, fright, I guess that's what differs anxiety from an anxiety disorder. The feelings we get may sometimes cause physical symptoms, such as a fast heart rate and shakiness. They're the typical symptoms people associate with it.

Several anxiety disorders can be diagnosed including generalised anxiety disorder, specific phobia, social anxiety disorder, separation anxiety disorder, agoraphobia, panic disorder, and selective mutism. In my case, you can probably say I have more than one. I would tell you which ones but truth is, I have no idea.

I am not diagnosed.

They say you can't say you have something unless you have proof, I don't need proof – them medical reports or the pills some get prescribed to calm themselves, I don't need them to know who I am. I know who I am, Adelaine Colbert, the girl who barely passed her GCSE exams with occasional C's and way too many D grades, the girl who skipped school days when she heard she had to perform a presentation of some sort on a topic in certain lessons, the girl who hid behind the Maths block every lunchtime in midst of having a panic attack. Yes, you heard me. Believe me now? Like I said, a little slip of paper with the words anxiety written on it isn't needed to know who I am. If you need proof, here you are, me, Adelaine Colbert, a seventeen-year-old college dropout, family failure and socially awkward. Not much to really say about myself except the fact most people think I am an attention seeker, someone who simply is just too overdramatic, too sensitive, too weak. My parents, for instance, biggest example here.