My anxiety is a bee. It lives in my head, constantly buzzing. Never letting me forget it's there. Just like white noise, there are times I can turn down the volume, but never enough to ignore it completely. Sometimes this bee nests in the honeycomb that is my brain. Trying to find nectar, it pokes around triggering my nervous system. Suddenly, without warning it stings. My hands shake and it's hard to breathe, but the bee continues to sting. Over and over again until I scream. Stinger finally retracted, the swelling doesn't immediately subside; I'm left a nervous wreck. As my hands steady and my breathing begins to stabilize, I go back to pretending it's normal to live with a bee.
My depression is a bear. It cuddles up next to me in the middle of the night. Just like a grown child still attached to a security blanket, there's a comfort in it's warmth. But it becomes too warm. So warm that I almost can't breathe. And when that cuddly bear decides it's hungry, the suffocating warmth is the least of my worries. Claws out, teeth bared, the depression attacks. Sometimes I can play dead, pretending to not feel it sniff my neck and growl by my ear. When I flinch and show my weaknesses, depression comes to kill. Sometimes blood is shed, wounds reopen, and I'm left with scars deeper than the ones before. But other times I can talk it down, talk it back into a hibernating state, where I can pretend that it's normal to live with a bear.
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