what Anxiety Feels Like

From the outside it is easy to think that someone has it all figured out. Just because my hair is curled and my cheeks are intentionally flushed, I must not have a care in the world like my demons should be pinned like a scarlet letter to my chest.
 And they assume that if you can not see it, then it isn’t really there. As if the pain doesn’t exist unless you are bleeding, slung in a cast, or staggering with a limp. But sometimes the most painful demons are the ones they can’t actually see.
 So we learn how to smile, grin, and bare it because nobody likes to talk about the tough stuff. Heck, I don’t even like to talk about the tough stuff. 
I have anxiety
 It feels like every cell in my body is moving so fast that my veins are blurry. That despite the constant metronome of my heart beat inside my ears, it’s like listening to a spastic drumline. It feels like bees in my ears, like a broken white noise machine playing all the sounds at once
 Yet  I don’t even realize I am gritting my teeth, or cracking my knuckles or rubbing my fore finger against my pinky, or twisting the black band on my ring finger. Holding onto myself like I am the only lifeline bridging the gap between reality on my own two feet 
The atomically loud abis of noises, sounds, and feeling of fleeting crushes through my veins. And I am avoiding eye contact, not because I am not listening to what you are saying, but because I am listening to the sound of my own voice, hoping that through your ears you can’t that it is two octaves too high and on the verge of breaking because my palms are sweating and I somehow forgot to speak with anything behind my words other than insecurities
 My anxiety feels like fire unexplainably hot and rash and frustrating as I knaw on the inside of my cheek and as if the solution to this feeling is buried between my teeth and gum.
 It feels like drowning but it feels like burning and it feels like forever. I imagine my feet moving with little clouds of dust like in those cartoons because somehow it feels like I am moving faster than the sixty seconds they allow in a minute. All the while I am just playing catch up on the stopwatch.
 It doesn’t add up like it did in middle school math. I can’t carry the one and find the square root of the problems because most of the time there is no problem. There is no life or death situation there is no rhyme or reason, there is just feelings and I am feeling them all at once.
 Some days are better than others. Some days are worse, but they are just days and I got more of where they came from.