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ACCOLADE · 2023
- Ct2
- Hs2
- Ax
- Nm
Prayers by the Healing Altar
Anxiety hums beneath the kneeling, the unnamed threat that made the asking necessary in the first place.
Anxiety
The Hum
EXTREME
RARE
LOW-MID · Temporal
Low-grade sustained threat signal. Fear without an object, running continuously with nothing to respond to. Fear ends when the threat ends. Anxiety has nothing to end.
The word
Latin anxietas, from angere, to choke, on the same narrow root as anguish and angina. The word has always been physical: a tightening. Medicine used it for centuries before psychology claimed it, and Freud's Angst fixed it at the centre of the modern vocabulary.
The feeling
A hum under everything. Threat-detection running continuously with nothing to detect, so it scans: chest slightly tight, breath slightly high, thoughts rehearsing futures at a rate no future could match. Time tilts forward; the present is only a staging area. It is exhausting in a way acute fear is not, because it never resolves into an event that could end it.
Against its neighbours
Fear has an object and ends when the object does; anxiety has no object, which is precisely why it does not end. Dread at least knows what is coming; anxiety is dread that lost the appointment card.
In the work
Texture that will not resolve. A field agitated at low amplitude across the whole surface, with no point of origin.
1 work composed with Anxiety
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