Inward.

A Story by catbyron

Anxiety and loneliness walked beside me like two faithful rabid dogs that every once in a while would bite my hand just to remind me that they are there. People ignorant enough to think that they were not alone and that they had friends that cared about them made me green with envy. I also envied people who were always surprised by the bad things that happened in their lives, like that moment was some unexpected, unwanted twist in their otherwise sunny, flower-clad path in life. It seemed that I was not meant for the odd bad surprise in life, or for being caught unaware; instead I was destined for the more sophisticated torture of always expecting bad things to happen. But still, on the whole, anxiety probably helps more than it hinders; it makes you so insecure and remote and guilty that ultimately you end up putting that much more effort into whatever it is that you do. At least that's how my mind worked. And because it is usually the case that anxious people think they are doing much worse than they actually are, the extra guil-ridden effort seemed to make them even better.

Loneliness, on the other hand, was a far more overbearing companion. I never felt antisocial, or difficult. I just found it very difficult to find people that I respected rather than just liked. I was sick of just liking people; I would have probably even told you at that point in my life that liking someone is a more dull kind of affinity than indifference. Ultimately I understood why he had to go. I also was honest enough to see why I should stay behind. To abandon my research would have been abandoing not the thing I'm necessarily best at, but more so the thing that I had done for the longest time, the one constant in my life. Seen as in my theory I was so committed to self-respect and authenticity, to follow somebody to Vietnam would have been like cutting an arm. So, instead I trained my mind to travel there. I hanged a map of the world right beside my bed so that it would be the first thing I saw in the morning and the last one when I fell asleep. I would make my eyes go from London to Saigon, back and forth, crossing Europe and Asia and measuring the lenght of that imaginary line. At the peak of my insomnia, I would stare so hard at the water exposed contour of the country that, when I finally closed my eyes, a Vietnam-shaped colourful spot would be indented on my retina.