Porter, Summer

Easing Anxiety Worksheet

by Summer Porter

Directions: When you’re experiencing intense anxiety, you need to ground yourself in order to prevent yourself from the popular phenomenon of “spiralling.” Come out of your mind and into the physical world. Realise everything is okay. Try doing this with the following exercise. Write down 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste.

5 things you can see:

(1) Smacking raindrops on fingerprint-stained windowpanes, blurring my view of the parking lot and its impatient drivers, soaked trees between pavement strips.

(2) The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. It’s $28.99 and I think we need that money to pay for gas to get to Boston, but he’s smiling so wide.

  1. (3)  My coffee from the bookshop we went to before this one. It’s cosier but closes at 3 PM. The owner’s 12-year-old (probably) son gave me a tour of all of the books he and his mom recommend. I’d like to have a son like him. He likes Norse mythology. His cat’s name was Freja, like my tattoo.

  2. (4)  My autumn-dyed knitted gloves, fingerless and starting to fall apart after catching on my rings day after day. I still wear them. My friend and I found them at the holiday market Girl Scouts’ booth for $10. They’re cosier than the H&M ones my mom bought me, but I don’t tell her that.

  3. (5)  The bloodied nailbeds of his left-hand. I tell him to be gentle with himself, but the habit is too ingrained to be stopped by a lover’s chidings. He says it doesn’t hurt too much, but I see him wince when it starts to sting, sometimes. I give myself bruises, though, so I can’t really say too much in the name of hypocrisy.

4 things you can touch:

  1. (1)  This pen pressing into the writer’s dent on my ring finger. It gets sore sometimes, with the rigid plastic squishing reddened flesh. My sister’s pokes out, instead of going in. I wonder what that says about us. Maybe nothing.

  2. (2)  The underside of the skin just above my kneecap, pushed into the upper side of the opposite leg. My fingers nestle into this in-between space, in the warmth of this fleshy cove. When I remove them, they’re cold.

  3. (3)  The bridge of my glasses. Two sleek metal bars pressing against the space my eyebrows straddle, hiding unshaven hairs. I always thought they were cool glasses, like an ‘80s computer nerd and what the ten-year-old version of my brother wore. Now an acquaintance says they look like Jeffrey Dahmer glasses and I can’t think of them the same.

  4. (4)  The inch-long ring on his right hand, like an old Arthurian house symbol. I tuck it in between my little fingers when we hold hands, struggling around it but savouring its consistent presence, like a secret little totem. It’s far too big for my finger, but I like trying it on sometimes anyway.

3 things you can hear:

  1. (1)  Her pleasant-pitched 감사합니다 two tables down. She repeats it three times, and I wonder if she’s teaching the white family she’s with. Her daughter stays silent. She eventually gets up with the little white girl to look at books together while the women stay back, engaged in motherly confidance with showcase sincerity.

  2. (2)  The almond milk steaming behind the coffee bar, its high-pitched squealing intermingling with the oven’s beeping. The mother the latte is presumably for stands at the counter, entertaining her baby with one of the compostable straws piled high by understaffed baristas. Grande latte, almond milk, he calls, and she puts the straw away, and the baby cries, and I feel like crying too.

  3. (3)  The sniffling of the old man sitting behind me with a haphazard pile of strangely assorted books. An array of classics to his left and some contemporary fiction to his right. He holds a manga in his hands, and I think its cover looks more interesting than anything else.

2 things you can smell:

  1. (1)  The rich burnt-chocolate smell of the cookie in front of me. The oozy blend coats my fingers, cakes beneath my nails. It smells like s’mores, even though it’s just a chocolate-chunk cookie. I think about study trips with my mom in high school, helping her with her astronomy homework. I haven’t thought about that for a long time. The cookie sits heavy in my stomach.

  2. (2)  The musty scent of the crowd packed into this little veranda, seeking literary escape from the pervading gloom of rainy days. Some have matted hair and leftover rain splattered on their faces that look like dried tears. I try not to look at them.

1 thing you can taste:

(1) The coppery sting of blood as my tooth tears into my bottom lip, willing myself to black out of my mind long enough to reboot. I want to sleep but sleep too much and my therapist says its bad for me but I skipped our last appointment and she leaves in two weeks so fuck her.

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Summer Porter is a multi-form writer based in Boston, MA. She experiments with long-form fiction, flash fiction and non-fiction, form fiction, poetry, short stories, and multimodal representations of literature, specifically in a digital context. She typically explores unsettling reflections of the self as well as one’s relations to others and the earth within her work, taking inspiration from Rachel Cusk, Ken Liu, and Sally Rooney.