The Feeling of an Octopus Sitting on Your Chest — Anxiety In Your Body
For some time now, Lily has been feeling something. Just something — couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. Sometimes when we feel something it can be physical and not entirely emotional. Or it can be emotional and start crawling down our bodies slowly. Lily, a girl who experiences anxiety from time to time, by the way, you can read about her journey of anxiety, decided to look into this feeling and understand what it is.
The best way that she managed to put the feeling into words was this — the feeling of an octopus sitting on her chest. It makes you start taking smaller breathes, tightens your chest, makes your whole body feel dizzy and shaky. It also makes you feel very aware of your heart rate. I guess that’s because you can almost hear it — it gets so loud and fast.
So this octopus that is sitting on Lily’s chest is using its 8 long legs to move around her body. First, it takes one leg and wraps it around the left side of her upper body. Then it takes the second leg, wraps it around her right side. It then starts tightening, while using its 3rd and 4th legs to get into her body and mix her insights. The 5th leg seems to be the octopus’s favorite, because it wraps around Lily’s heart and starts to squeeze it. The 6th and 7th legs go a little down and tighten her belly.
Well, the 8th one has no other place but to wrap itself up around Lily’s throat. Once it has its legs situated, the octopus starts to dance like a stripper on a pole, with very slow and steady movements crawling and twirling all over.
Lily wishes she could just grab the octopus by its head, yank it harshly and through far far away. But for some reason, she can’t see the octopus. I guess it’s for the same reason we can’t see or touch our anxiety. It’s there, somewhere in our head and mind. Where did it come from? Where does it want to take us?
The truth is, the octopus is going to leave soon — it could be done doing its sexy dance in 3 minutes, an hour or a day. But it’s going to get tired, tiring Lily with it. And when it does leave, Lily will feel restless, as if she threw big heavy rocks all day. So she’s going to want to take a nap, a very long one. And when she wakes up, she’s going to feel better.
Do you have an 8 legged octopus that visits your body from time to time?
