head in the clouds By Kendall Rosevelt Living with anxiety is not what I thought it would be. I remember being in middle school and hearing about anxiety and depression from the school guidance counselor, health class, even social media and thinking that anxiety was probably nothing. It could not possibly be as bad as people made it out to be—at least, not much worse than the stress and pressure I was used to experiencing every day. I never considered the fact that I might be struggling with anxiety until much later, and even now, I find myself doubting the reality I’m in, believing I must have invented it somehow. Whether I created it or not, however, I do not understand it—why it persists, even now that the pressures I faced in childhood have mostly been alleviated. I like to imagine my fears are like clouds. Some of them, I can see right through, and others require me to lie down and stare into the sky before they reveal to me what they really are. But sometimes, the clouds cover the sun, leaving my world cold and dark as I urge them to pass. Oftentimes, when someone asks me what my sky looks like, I don’t have an answer for them. In these moments, my anxiety invades and it is as if all the clouds in the universe have been pushed together so tightly that they will never part, as if no single cloud can be removed, and I will never know what lies behind them. Panic rises
within me—I am lost in the clouds, yet I cannot distinguish a single one. My vision is blurry; my eyes dart throughout the sky, searching for any explanation, any way out of this inescapable fog. Am I stressed about my classes? Am I anxious about a friend? Am I frustrated with a family member? I suddenly wish I were—because which is worse, to feel overwhelmed about something concrete that I can change or to acknowledge that right now, I can’t answer that question? Or furthermore, that the answer to that question has grown into something so daunting that it would be better to live with the ambiguity of my surroundings than to think about it for a second longer? So when someone asks me what my sky looks like, I describe to them a translucent cloud—one that can be easily dispelled. I avert my eyes from the sky and try to direct my vision elsewhere. I’m pretty good at looking off in this way; the clouds stay in the sky, and I stay on the ground. But sometimes my clouds don’t stay in the sky—sometimes, they sink down until they meet me where I am, and they smother the earth around me. My fears are often doubts, and when I am feeling especially frustrated, I wonder who I could be without them. When my entire world is covered in a thick fog, how am I to know where to go? What am I to do but search for any point in the distance and follow it? When the fog
