Help

Anxiety stabs me in the chest. It bears down on me like a heavy object, choking the life out of me. I feel worthless and ugly, like a mistake that keeps perpetuating mistakes. I can't do anything right. Everything I do is wrong, ugly just like me.

I hate myself when I'm anxious. I hate everything about life; I can hardly function.

Help! I think. But no help comes. Just like no help ever came when my crazy-maker mother made me feel so anxious about life. A misspoken word. A word at all. A look. A sigh. Anything that smacked of me - myself, not her or her ideas, but my own free will - was punished with tears, pouting, and silence, with her look of death, with tirades of abuse that I just had to stand there and take. Then, after she'd spouted her fury, I'd retreat to my room and pray to a God whose help never came. He never stopped her from beating me up. He never did anything to comfort me.

The one time I thought God visited me, I felt a black presence come over me, a feeling of being horribly wrong to wonder if He existed. I was 13, anorexic, praying to a God who gave me a witch for a mother.

I cry out to Him now - help me, oh God. Help me with this terrible anxiety, this feeling of dread. The tightness in my chest. The worry that I'm ugly and messing up my life and incompetent. Give me faith to see that the way my job is working out is your way of providing for me. Please, God. Please answer my prayer and help me to know what to do with all the times you never sent help, all the times I wondered how you could make such a worthless, sinful person.

Where were you when I needed you? Where are you when I need you now? Please touch my heart and soften the anxiety. Please give me peace.