I’m an overthinker. 

It also just happens that I’m a sixteen-year-old teenager who likes to choose many girls to hopelessly fall in love with. You might think, but this is all good and normal, no? Well, not really, and I realized this fact a bit too late; I realized this fact the split second after I stood, wheezing, into the frigid, late November air last winter. 

I was in a dark room, illuminated only by the dim study lamp perched on top of my desk. Legs swung onto the side of my chair, head propped on one elbow, I stared off into the shadows. I was in a deep state of mental fantasy; however, the underlying notion of rejection pranced through my thoughts. 

And then, out of nowhere, the depression of rejection hit. 

It hit my body - but rather than stopping my heart - it jumpstarted it. And so, my heart was thumping and I was barely breathing, but then I had to breathe heavily to catch up with my scrambling heart. In that moment of madness, I grasped the lever of the window and forced it open, thrusting my face into the welcoming arms of fresh air. 

Then, I was alright. The whole ordeal lasted no more than two minutes, but the scars dug deep into the months that followed it. In that moment of madness, I also grasped that, I, at peak health in my teenage years, was not invincible to the contagion that seem to infect all of humankind - I had suffered an anxiety attack. 

Only then, in that dark, suffocating room, did I realize that my overthinking tendencies together with my lackluster ability for communication was a match made in hell. The overwhelming pressure inside my brain became a hot air balloon - threatening to pop. Nevertheless, my deeply insecure self was still unable open my mouth to ask for help and to ask for a fellow bearer for my burden. 

I remember multiple times, in the hazy snow of English winter, I would meet my school therapist, only to avoid the topic of love that was tormenting me the most. Again and again, I would open my mouth with the single inclination of finally relieving my issues, then to close it, and to close of myself to the seemingly terrifying world around me. 

And in the same hazy snow that was the English winter, I was lost. 

I was lost in the societal notion that when you have anxiety, you needed to search for help. I did. I can’t. Until I wrote it down; until I wrote down the floodgates that were my feelings. 

Throughout my life, I was always sceptical of journaling. ‘It’s a waste of time,’ I would also tell myself, and thus I deceived myself into never trying it out. That was until I had a heart-to-heart talk with one of my close friends, whom I admired very much, when he named journaling as his favorite past time. 

It took me three months to put pen to paper. But, in the end, the crippling reality of silent suffering brought me to a green journal - my very first journal. 

At first, I was scared. Just like every first-time writer, I was scared that someone is going to flip through my journal and read everything. Thus, I wrote down everything in my very own cryptic symbolism, a girl might have just been a fox, whereas a guy may have been a dolphin. Nonetheless, very slowly, my true feelings did flood the paper, until it became not just a place I document everything that went wrong, but also everything that was doing right; everything that I was doing better. 

Gradually, I was getting better. 

The helpless anxiety attacks that haunted me melted away just as the English snow in the cheery spring. I started sleeping more, from my original, haunted dreams to a type of unbeknownst tranquility, and for the first time in a long time, I managed to focus. My brain was no long a haywire of broken thoughts, but a coherent fuel engine that was driving me on. It was driving forward because I finally put my shaking hand on the steering wheel and grasped it tight. 

To my surprise, the pages in my green journal - once awash with a beige emptiness - was now awash with my words: beautiful words that transformed my life. Within a flurry of weeks, the green journal was…finished, and within another, my pink journal, then my red journal, then my purple journal… 

It’s now August, and I’m on my fifth, blue journal. As summer turns into fall, I guess my present contentment is the best fruit that I could possibly reap in this season of rewards. I’m still an overthinker, but it doesn’t matter because I can overthink with my words; always with my words: in my journal.