⚠️ This is a true story, unfortunately.
🖤1st in a series
✅Completed
I labeled this as teen "fiction" because my target age group usually thinks of self-help books or text books when they hear "non-fiction" and don't realize a memoir reads like a...
Like with anything else, you never know how much progress you've made until you're put to the test. If I was put into some type of situation that would require me to input my newly learned skills, I would either shock myself by how different my reaction was, at least control my reaction and weigh my options before I made any decisions, or I could fail miserably and have to keep trying. Shannon had given me worksheets to keep track of my daily progress, so I could readily see where I needed work.
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One of those moments came in late December, right before I started at the local community college, that January. I'd taken the rest of the year off, to work on myself before throwing myself back into school. My plan was double major in theater and psychology, and go there for a year before transferring to a university; despite my belief that college is frivolous and unnecessary. I'd been running errands and had time to kill, so I stopped over at Ally's for a visit. I let myself in through the garage and heard her hair dryer going, upstairs. I found her in her bathroom, still wrapped in a towel and dripping wet. She gave me a weird, half-hearted smile in the mirror. I noticed her face was red but I couldn't tell if she'd been crying or was just hot from showering, as I noticed fresh steam still in the air and clinging to the mirrors. T: "You ok?" She nodded and tried to smile a little bigger. I leaned against the doorway and studied her in the mirror. T: "Yeah...you're bullshitting me. Judge Judy starts in an hour, I don't have time for bullshit. What's wrong?"
She turned off the hair dryer and stared at herself all defeated like, in the mirror, before the poor kid just burst into tears. I was frozen in shock for a minute. I hadn't seen Ally cry since she was in diapers. I was a goddamn puddle of tears before I could make my way across the bathroom to hug her. Seeing her cry really bitch slapped me in the feels something fierce. T: "Why are you crying!?" A: "Why are you crying!?" T: "Because you are! If you would answer my initial question, we could solve all this!" She buried her face in my shirt and continued crying for a few minutes, until she was ready to talk. A: "Tayl, it's so bad." T: "What is!? You can't just start a sentence off like that and not elaborate." A: "My anxiety. It's horrible. It didn't use to be like this. I have panic attacks every day. I feel like I'm literally gonna die. I can't breathe and start shaking. I feel like my heart is just gonna give out. I get anxious about everyone and everything, sometimes I don't even know why."
I felt frozen, like my blood stopped pumping, my heart stopped beating, the neurons in my brain stopped firing. I felt like my heart physically shattered into pieces, hearing that all too familiar sentence. There was no way I could watch her go through what I did. I couldn't say I was wildly surprised she had anxiety, as I could pick out instances when she was younger that gave it away, but it's hard to tell whats a disorder and what normal childhood worry. It really never crossed my mind as she got older, let alone would I think she had it so bad that it had progressed to this point. I had no idea how she hid it so well and there I was, laying all my shit on her for so long, when she had her own shit to deal with. I thought of her starving herself, sitting in the dark, feeling alone and depressed, snapping and killing herself.
