New With Every Breath

You are new with every breath. That’s what my mom says whenever I start to panic, to shut down, and curl into myself. It happens surprisingly often now that I am in my last two years of high school. I panic about everything: schoolwork and homework and chores and extracurricular activities and colleges and social stuff. I feel it wrecking my body and my carefully balanced mental state and exploding through my emotional equity. People tell me to calm down, but how can I be calm when I am being torn apart from the inside out. They say it’s okay, that I should be enjoying life, as young as I am, but how can I do that when all I feel is a persistent dread, vibrating through me. Anxiety overwhelms me, pushing me down and down and down through each layer to a new darkness.

So I cling to my mother’s words, you are new with every breath, and with every breath I am someone else. One breath and I am a zookeeper, watching the lazy tigers stretch and the lions open and close their bear-trap jaws. Two breaths and I am scientist, peering through a microscope to see the perfect cells of a leaf, the light bright and shining through their thin walls. Three breaths and I am an explorer, paddling rhythmically along a winding river, a waterfall splashing down behind me. And with each breath I feel myself become better, bigger, more powerful than I was before.

It is only when I stop counting my breaths that I return to my own body and I feel just as weak as I was before. My bones feel like toothpicks stuck in my gelatine flesh and my eyes feel like twin pinpoints of laser light, so strong and narrow that they start to burn up the skin around them. It is then that I am stuck in the glue of my life, a fly struggling in life’s spider web. It feels now like every breath brings new pain and suffering. I am new with every breath, but it is not a good sort of new. It is like a knife wound in your stomach. With each second the pain grows greater, as infection sets in and the pain spreads to your entire body. Again and again and the pain grows more and more. Welcome to the real world; you are new with every breath.