Basic Paranoia

What it’s like to live in basic paranoia:

It’s scary and tense and stressful, to say the least. It’s the constant feeling of being watched, or being followed, the constant feeling in the back of your mind whispering to you deviously that someone’s right behind you and you need to turn around right now! But you know you’re safe in your house, and that you’re alone in your room and the door is closed, and there’s a chime on the handle so you would hear if anyone entered. It’s the feeling of being trailed even though you can’t hear any footsteps behind you, and you’ve already turned around several, several, multiple times before to check, and you’ve used you’re phone as a sort of rear-view mirror, so you should be totally satisfied with the absolute fact that there simply isn’t anyone else on this street, but you still your breaths short and panicked, and you find yourself walking faster and faster towards your home, until you’re behind several locked doors and you’re curled up in the furthest corner of your bed surrounded on all four sides with big fluffy pillows and the blanket is wrapped tightly around you three-hundred-sixty degrees so that not even your ears, neck, or shoulders, not even a single toe, is exposed to the air. But even then you can’t rest peacefully. 

It’s that nagging, eerie voice that won’t shut up, even though it’s three in the morning, you have a lecture you have to attend in six hours, and you can feel the tiredness taking form into a living thing that’s caressing your cheek singing lullabies and reciting bedtime stories, but you still just can’t fall asleep, because you feel exposed, too exposed, and vulnerable, and you can’t help but see monsters and death and you getting swallowed whole by your own mind’s creations as soon as you start to drift over into unconsciousness. It’s the way you still have to wrap yourself in blankets until not a bit of skin is exposed into the air, even though it’s eighty, ninety degrees tonight and you’re melting from the heat. 

It’s this, these, that feeling that makes you feel nauseous and dizzy to think about, and you feel your stomach and guts twisting into an impossible knot as you try to calm down and focus on the scarily large amounts of work that’s due tomorrow but you still feel so tired from constantly being tense and on the metaphoric edge of your seat because of stupidly overactive imagined stories your childish brain decided to write up and wouldn’t let go of years later. (And even now you feel that horrid feeling that there’s danger looming behind you.) It’s stressful, absolutely stressful, and a lot of times you wonder why, and if something’s wrong with you, and you wish you could just be more trusting of your environment, but all the same, it’s just who you are, and it’s just something you have to deal with, you suppose.