my avoidance anaconda

2024-02-05

"Well miss, you are suffering from a crocodile. You are not the first and you certainly won't be the last. You'll get through it very well, I assure you."

• In Between animation short

For years I've lived a shadow of myself, mostly in fear of how others would react if I expressed my true self.

In the past few years, I started to isolate from all the noise of the outside world. I wanted to look at myself without judgment, to find who I can be without the expectations of society.

In my mind, there is a large snake coiled around me, my avoidance anaconda.¹ He shields me from the world, letting only a few trusted people or communities in. My anaconda forms a cylinder around me so that I can dwell on his beautiful skin rather than on toxic social interactions.

I am thankful for my anaconda friend. With his help, I was able to retreat inward and to study who I am when I'm not responding a constant barrage of input. I learned to live not above or below the judgment of others, but in a different world entirely, my little anaconda world.

Lately though, he has gone too far. In separating myself to this degree, I've lost track of what is meaningful. It is becoming hard to articulate goals for my life within society when I've moved so far outside of it. I've dug and found these otherwise quiet parts of myself, but those parts that thrive on observation and play with the world have been left to wither in the tiny anaconda world.

Now that I've found myself, I want to come back slowly into the world. I want us to be free, my anaconda and me.

#anxiety