My Anxiety is Different Now
Thoughts from the produce aisle
It’s Monday and I’m standing in front of a mountain of peaches in Fred Meyer. They all look perfect, every single one, but I reach out and start squeezing them anyway.
Uh oh. Hard, hard, hard, rubbery, hard …
Each piece of fruit is so big, holding them in my hand makes me feel like Hamlet complaining to poor Yorick. I find one that gives a little under my fingers, but decide the sensation came from squeezing too hard. It might be bruised now. I keep grabbing, choosing at random. I might have already tried this one — its lopsidedness seems familiar— but I give it a press just in case.
Another person joins me at the peaches and now we’re squeezing all of them together. A hunched older man shuffles past and bags the first peach he touches. I wonder if the person next to me knows what they’re looking for or if they will know when they squeeze it.
Anxiety used to feel like realizing that I forgot to finish a homework assignment worth 95% of my grade. It was a pang of something close to embarrassment. It was like hearing a ticking clock and not being able to unhear the ticking. No matter how many things I checked off my to do list, I could never do enough, be enough.
There’s been a slow shift, but the sensation of anxiety has changed. It’s no longer the feeling of not having done something; it’s the feeling that I’ve already done something. Something irreversible and something destructive. Some decision I casually made when I was 27 that started a chain reaction that will, at any moment, culminate in my ruin. The trust I have in myself gets shut behind a protective door, like a Scrooge McDuck bank vault door, and recently making decisions feels like playing hopscotch in a field of landmines. Landmines that (hear me out) I myself buried five years ago and forgot about.
If I squint hard enough, my past anxiety looks like flight and my current anxiety resembles freeze. I wonder what it would be like to experience fight.
I pick out two peaches not because I think they are perfect or even ripe, but because I worry I’ve been standing in front of the peaches for too long. Pretty funny if you think about it — does my brain think Fred Meyer himself is hiding in the produce aisle with a stopwatch and a shot gun?
When I unpack at home, I squeeze the two massive pieces of fruit as if something could’ve changed in the last half an hour. Throughout my entire childhood, there was a dense rubber ball, pink like an eraser, in our hall closet with the rest of the outdoor stuff. It was heavy and not ideal for playing catch, so it stayed in the closet more often than not. Later I learned it was a lacrosse ball. No one in my family ever played lacrosse or liked lacrosse, and it makes no sense why we had it or why we kept it. But that’s what the peaches feel like: the mysterious too solid lacrosse ball.
The peaches will sit on top of the fridge for a few days. I’ll work at my desk and go for walks and be excited when Mister sees birds out the window. West and I will take turns making dinner and we will get mail and we will plan to go to the beach. Eventually, I’ll return from a long walk around my new neighborhood and be so hungry for a peach that I barely check its ripeness before taking a huge bite.
It’s sweeter than I thought it’d be.
