Therapy Bits

Anxiety is a house I live in, not by choice but by slow inheritance, brick by breathless brick. The windows rattle with imagined winds, though the sky is blue and smiling. The doors creak even when closed. I walk its hallways barefoot, tiptoeing past the rooms where thoughts echo too loud. Somewhere, a faucet drips in the cadence of questions I cannot answer—what if, what if, what if.

The walls are papered with old conversations, replayed on loop like a film projector gone mad. I press my ear to them, trying to hear the silence behind the static, but the volume is always turned up just a little too high. Some mornings I wake to find the floor tilting slightly, as if the world has shifted while I slept—though I never really sleep, only drift in the shallow tide of half-dreams and clenched fists.

I’ve learned to live here. I dust the corners of my mind, rearrange the furniture of my coping. I hang art on the walls—small victories, framed and nailed down so they don’t float away. Sometimes I open the curtains and light pours in like forgiveness. Sometimes the house hums softly and I forget it ever scared me. Sometimes, I step outside.

But even then, I carry the keys in my pocket. The weight is familiar. Cold. Real. Anxiety is not a monster in the closet—it is the closet, the hallway, the whole damn house. And somehow, I’ve made it a home.