...I never planned to add to Anxious reader, butttt... Like..I turned on my notebook to study and immediately got flashbacked to this week bc I work mostly on a computer and immediately my anxiety spiked?? Send help I think I'm about to go on a anxiety high for a good month or so before it settles again
You shake, you shake and you feel the pressure in your lungs, the weight in your stomach, the buzz in your head. Anxiety settles between your ribs and underneath your skin like a familiar blanket. You almost embrace it, maybe because it's easier to just accept it than try to stop it, it never stops, it had never stopped and you eventually understood it never would.
Your mind keeps flitting over worries, how you can be better, how the weight of this mission's outcome is also on your shoulders, and you're sure you're not enough, you're sure you'll fail, because you don't have enough experience, you are too dumb, too careless. Remember that time you failed during training? Or that time you forgot one step that would've gotten your comrades killed in the field? Or when you trembled while trying to shoot? It'll happen again. It'll happen again and you'll die and kill the others because you're not enough—
"Kid!"
You snap your eyes snap to your Captain, and you feel like crying. He's seeing how nervous you are and now he'll know your confidence and skill are just an act.
"Breathe— just keep breathing swee'eart"
you hear Gaz murmur and his hand squeezes your arm, and the pressure and warmth of his gloved hand seems to weight you back to reality for a second. You focus on it, then try to focus on his breathing, but you can barely think with how terribly anxious you feel.
"You're safe, we're safe, relax"
He says, but you can't believe that, you can't because this is already how you feel all the time, you can't because it's been years that the moment you step on base or on field, you're tense, that the only moments you're not feeling two seconds for throwing up is when you're on your flat halfway across the city.
Either way, you try. You squeeze Gaz's vest, you let him hug you and you focus on his breathing, the more you focus on breathing slowly, the more a heavy exhaustion settles, eyes closing as you simply feel tired, so so tired. You don't question that as soon as you stop trembling, your body slumps. It's the routine you usually did in your bunker, trembling and crying until exhaustion screamed louder and you simply fell asleep.
And that's what happened, you slumped, like kicked out cold, whole body going slack as Gaz held you. The team shared a look, a horrified one, not because they thought of you as a liability or as a bad soldier, but because they felt dread pool in their stomachs at how you had been hiding your pain and going through it on your own. A quiet tension settles between them when Gaz carries you to the couch and let's you sleep, they don't need to talk to know what their common goal is now.
They won't let that go on any longer. None of them could handle letting you go through it alone after seeing how you looked, how small you made yourself be. You were their teammate, and they took care of what was theirs.