In retrospect, dread must have come upon me fairly early in life,  though there is no penultimate event I can pinpoint as being its source. Instead, many childhood memories are actually completely the opposite.  I can picture plenty of sunny Saturday mornings happily coked up on the corn syrup rush of kiddie breakfast cereals, watching cartoons, running around imitating the sound effects and voices until I would fall over dizzy, my bathrobe flapping upon legs kicking in the air like a winded can-can dancer.  Dread came later the next evening with the impending knowledge of school.  Ah, so much to look forward to during what seemed to be an eon of bullying and trying to hide in plain sight like a four-eyed buck-toothed bunny in braces and a bone-protruding glandular condition.  Certainly one can see how any of this would make one an easy target and fodder for those hormonally-wired to petty predatory displays, as much as referring to oneself in such a singular manner could set off another's hair-trigger psychosis regarding good grammar spoken with a lisp. School days, school days, happy golden rule days...

Some of this preadolescent existential angst must have also been genetic, however.  In prehistoric times, it seems to me there had to have been many a caveman who'd rather stay in drawing on stone walls by the fire rather than go out and deal with a carnivorous thirty-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus Rex.  It just stands to reason: the theory of survival as an instinctive intelligence after the repeated trauma of seeing fellow cave-people selected as entrees from Nature's buffet.  Even the necessary tasks of foraging, of hunting/gathering had to be met with an internal choral groan instead of a gleeful "oh goodie" sometimes, especially while also having to deal with boar-sized insects and boiling pits of tarry lava.  Still, fight or flight, the human species had no other choice but to persist even if nerves of steel seems less realistic than a boy-this-is- stupid,-well-let's- get-on-with-it ethic.

Nature versus nurture; in either there are environmental factors playing hopscotch with arguments of cause and effect, but what about the surprising blips on the helix of spiraling DNA?  My parents certainly did not nurture and encourage me into a nature of shy effeminacy so, empirically, where did the origins stem?  Spiritualists might consider the past-lives view; perhaps reincarnation from a geisha hobbled by bound feet and unfortunately already culturally indoctrinated to see only diminished horizons among the royal fowl pecking away in the cloistered courtyard of ornate wall after wall.  In other words: someday your prince may come, but it might entail mud wrestling in a snake pit with the other hapless concubines to win his affection.  Oh, joy.

Assuming astuteness on your part, it is slowly being revealed here that this author is using humor as obfuscation for a character whose sentence structures nevertheless give his questionable emotional state away. (Huh?) "The Elements of Style", that 1919 textbook tome by William Strunk Jr. composed as a how-to writing guide might very well find itself acting as a blunt instrument if faced with this essay, these words pretending to be in search of themselves while actually simultaneously trying to entirely dodge their subject matter.  Yes, I might relish being multisyllabic as a percussion instrument but I am not so clever now, am I, with anxiety free-basing these words until typing can barely keep up with the racing thoughts?  No, I began with dread, dread as jaundiced and world-weary, dread sighing its way out of the womb already rolling eyes, asking for a cigarette and a very dry martini.  Dread as not-over-the-hill-yet, splendid Bette Davis in "All about Eve".  Dread as beautifully tragic Greta Garbo near the end of "Camille", a victim to how her love has been judged as illicit and thus how her worries must pay the ultimate price of actual physical demise: was it cholera or TB?

Truth is, cards on the table: anxiety is not manly, at least not according to the "anti-woke" toxicity which is still the prevalent definition of what masculinity is supposed to be according to large factions of the global population.  (There is much that is diminishing in that thought for to not be manly is to imply that one is therefore being womanly, e gads - and here is where the war between the sexes goes on a rampage even if gradations of both male and female go back and forth on either side.)  Anxiety is me in drag as the author Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne with the scarlet A signifying a crime worse than adultery.  In fact, for this case-study Hester is an hysteric shrike of asthenia crowned by a thorny rhinestone diadem with a capital D for Depression.  She is the groaning goblin trying to get out of bed but who would prefer avoiding the onslaught of consciousness altogether. She snuffles a whine a bit at the bathroom sink, raising the tap water to splash her face, trying to cut through the buzzing hive, the snarling rat's nest in her head, those voices droning noisily with a lifetime of negativity in the potential awfulizing and catastrophizing the day may bring, the faces of the rabble, the crowd at the crucifixion, those people she may know, gathering the stakes. Faggots, they are called.  Is that queer as in funny?  (Another tip: making grimacing silly squint-eyed, then bugged-eyed faces at one's self in the bathroom mirror also lessens apprehension a bit.)

Breathing through to plunge upward beyond the fuzzy eye-glazing sloth-broth which is the world upon waking, and which may come back again throughout the day, might require the finesse of fumbling around to focus on at least one annoying thing to bite her teeth into and pull herself up by. It's as if she is a mountain-climber in an avalanche and her anger, the sharp point of an axe, is thrown to a grip and a toe-hold. The flinging and the flung; that is the rhythm to not look down, to just get to the top, hand over hand, foot by foot. It is the only way to be where the air, though thin, is clearing.  A vision of, then the actuality of coffee and caffeine, certainly helps with the journey, a morning perk too from the necessary medications to take and think, gee, maybe this isn't so terrible after all, there might even be something, some one, I can be better than OK with at some point soon if I can leave the dross of myself behind.  Yes, cocoon to myself, I will burn it away like Lady Lazarus, and  a purer part of me could yet step through, one who I was, flame-glowing, before all else came.

But what was that before all else?  Ages of writers are admonished to show not to tell, because, telling, even if with a compelling, page-turning voice, is somehow considered "less than" say,  the action of a Tarzan escapade.  I'll give it a shot but don't expect Macho Papa Hemingway since, after all, this is coming from an anxious introspective introvert's psyche.

Consider the action like clips from film, visuals trying to stay in focus but reliant on memory and what scrambles over the cerebellum hills during the span of these words as, like an eight-ball fortune device, they float to mind.

And - scene: Fade in on fabric in half-light, a bit of swish and sway at my head and back, legs and feet getting pins and needles while kneeling on uncomfortable footwear that occasionally flops over with a thump.  God, that was loud.  Is anyone coming?  My parents are having company. How long before they leave? It's taking forever, this upstairs closet's getting darker, the linoleum floor, cold.  It makes me want to pee. Action: Alright shyness, sneak down to Dad's wardrobe.  Creak go the steps and the door's latch clicks too audibly. Some lion, witch, and story magic this is far from being for sure.  It is an early childhood memory but how often was the pattern repeated?  Up to my pre-teens until one day a cousin's toddler daughter comes to find me, thinks I'm playing hide and seek.  Takes my hand.  It is actually fine.  I am a spectre from between walls back out among the living.

Next scene, black and white on the tube: soldiers like my plastic toy green, but stumbling and sliding over each other in swampy mud, guns firing, rat-a-tat, do they actually flair there in the dusky diodes as the picture shifts to that of small foreigners in triangular straw hats, a young girl running screaming naked?  Her skin looks like its scalded and pouring.  The shot after that is of body bags.  Weirdly - duck and cover beneath measly desks - at schools they're still doing throwback nuclear war drills of the 1950s.  Recall the bomb shelter signs where the explosion had a skull's shape and having to stand in halls, face to walls, like that would protect us from whatever was dropped overhead.

A little dialogue:  "Mom, Stephen said he thinks that guy on TV is handsome too."  A little laughter before her voice:  "Well, maybe he's gonna be a fairy."  "Stephen, did you take your FemIron vitamin?" my brother asks, elbowing his visiting school chum.  I used to try and hit him but, middle child, as mom says, he was born a preemie and hence, came out fighting, and I'd lost to his fists one too many times. Meanwhile, "Cocksucker!", dad swears, having again dropped a screw for some aggravating household project he was tinkering with.

Another clip: close in on old-fashioned steam vaporizer used for asthmatics.  See a small skinny hand lifting a mercury thermometer to where the mist streams out, trying to raise the little red mark for fever and be too sick again for school, but uh oh, the heat makes it break.  Mercury pings silver everywhere for fingers to catch and magnetically push shiny liquid dots back together with just a little burn, burn, burn...

New scene: gray metal again, crammed with books, folders and sneakers.  Bang, my head hits the top shelf as I'm shoved.  Faggot, drain me dry.  I'm gonna lock you in there.

Now it's gym time.  Be one of the last picked for a team amid moans of "damn, he's no hitter", or see me on the ceiling-hung flying gymnastic rings.  "Notice the slender girly curve of his wrists," some preadolescent troll narrates.  He's the brother of my older sister's friend. Lots of canned laughter.  After attendance, time to skip class again.  Avoid the ogling showers and hide under the stairs.

Aroma of rubbing alcohol and band-aids, that nurse's station haven.  Were smelling salts used on me?  I don't even think they could give out aspirin.  The first panic attack came after one of those cautionary avoid stranger's-with-candy film in assembly hall.  Remember on the screen that big hulking man crunching through the woods, the little girl's screams, the image of her blood-stained ripped jumper in a puddle?  Another much later time was after reading Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" during English, that part where the oh-so-tradition-loving townsfolk start in with their stoning.  I was named after a saint pummeled to death by such rocks so for me "The Lottery" was either premonitory or a flashback.

New Scene:  darkened auditorium, two guys behind me blowing on my hair.  "Fags like to feel breath on their neck while being fucked up the ass."  I was maybe fifteen and actually still pretty clueless about any sort of sex, so what made them such experts?

Next take: my hands smashing glass bottles in the rusty burn bin used before the environmentally-enlightened age of recycling.  The crashing and splintering shimmers a feverish beat in my nervous system, pulse booming in the ears, an outlet for tormented rage.

Creative Writing Class:  "Quit calling on me for the answers.  I'm not your little performing monkey."  "Mr. H-----, what's he so mad about?"  "I have no idea.  Guess he's maybe gay." 

Home doing chores, dusting, vacuuming, someone's giggle:  "You'll make somebody a good housewife."

Health class:  "In this sex education semester we are only going to talk about the normal kind which happens between a man and a woman, none of that other funny monkey business.  I don't care what you guys might be seeing or hearing about from those fruit loops on TV."

On the bus, nose bleeding:  "Keep it up man, punch that fairy!"

Last scene:  Empty grain silo on the farm where I grew up.  Square doors with crossed iron handles easy for climbing.  Up the side, up, up, up.  Get a leg over, look inside at the drop. Pigeons cooing and fluttering.  Bargain with god: make it stop, make it stop.

Time to bring back the drag version of Hester Prynne.  She is fed up with knotting hair, gnashing teeth, shaking under the covers she stuffs in her mouth to suppress screaming.  She has learned how "ignore them and they'll go away" has not worked, and how hard it is to commit suicide. Guilt, guilt: think of your loved ones. She has learned how to suppress and repress, be soldered up as a mannequin who also, through it all, learned the mixed blessing of how to have empathy. To listen well is a way to give, maybe really even be liked.  Instinctively search for those who have it as bad or worse.  Fight your selfish sins of sensitivity.  Be strong as an advice columnist. So many will say you are their therapy, and it staunches some fear or hunger, this being needed by others, and it is some sort of growth, even if vicarious.  Moreover, hopefully, it is also some form of loving.  Yes, try to live in what others are feeling for somehow that emotional terrain corresponds to what's been tamped down, bluffed that although buried it is not still sinking.

Imagine how long time could go on just like that.  Imagine it as a development of character, of becoming more than one character in the play of one's own life.  Imagine too all the world news going on concurrently for perspective and changes in perspective concerning where one's place (or lack thereof) is amid the whole shifting picture.  Imagining it can perhaps make it so and acknowledge the reality that there were a great deal of soul-cleansing belly laughs along this path of quiet desperation, this path of branches trying to discover what would bring true peace in mind by hopefully one day feeling comfortable in one's own skin.

True, even if partially innate, self-hate is also learned by tons of exterior messages echoing throughout their own chamber of cultural, societal and environmental development.  True, the patterns I learned which augmented my anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, (and all that other fun and exciting hoopla), can be traced and made into a case as to why "poor life choices" were made.  Truth, though I believe in the importance of "owning it", and taking responsibility for what I supposedly selected - an alcoholic relationship for example - the "choice" was more a matter of unconsciously deciding on an illusion that this, whatever this was at the time, might help make me happy.  Yes, the anxiety etc. increased due to a contradiction that the opposite might be happening, that I hadn't selected what was good for me after all , had instead banked on a hope which was not requited, but anxiety and depression can simultaneously be pretty baseline when facing the absolute fact that I am part of a minority which is so often hated.  What I have had to do is learn how to live with this instead of die as a result of it, as has the anxiety of my now skipping, parasol-twirling Hester Prynne. In societies which do not value diversity, to be authentic in one's self can be dangerous, thus learning one has a relationship with anxiety and depression as a direct result, takes a kind of courage.

It is no wonder so many with creative inclinations wrestle with just these sort of facts while trying to identify and define their own definitions.  Hester looks at the current generation of them now coming of age amid the glut of social media bombardment, and still believes that anxiety is an obvious and understandable byproduct of cause and effect.  Fight or flight - who knows - it really may also be a genetic survival tool, though it is worth investigating how much anxiety is in fight to begin with; fight as in defending one's self as opposed to being the attacker; fight not as in gay or trans panic defense, the idea that someone flipped and murdered another out of a fear that the victim came onto them, and hence was somehow homicidally aggressive first.  Blaming the victim is the alternative version for the semantics there, a victim often sought out for being gay, bisexual or transgender in order to justify the attack.  Actually the panic the attacker claims to have experienced may very well stem from the attacker being freaked about having an attraction to the victim.

Is to acknowledge any of this to target me as a mark for stochastic and domestic terrorism?  Unfortunately the dystopian is no longer far-fetched Sci-Fi.  In a time before the wide scope of social media and readily available first-world devices to play a game of "Telephone" with, the propaganda machine, while successful in doing its damage, its venom took a bit longer to reach its prey.  Nazism and McCarthyism are two of the most cited examples of this and their destruction still appalls despite whatever measures of justice continue being attempted. Back and back we could go with this phenomenon to the lies that justify slavery and indigenous genocide.

A question of broad strokes:  has the human species learned nothing from history or have certain factions stopped teaching truth so they can get away with repeating ancestral injuries to the point of killing?  Does a large faction of the human race actually have the moral compass of a Timex taken off a corpse from a plundered grave?  Is this why hate mongering is so prevalent, so greatly out of control while spinning viral news cycle to news cycle, that it is just easier to allow it, if not laud it, and pass it on, pass it on, post and "like" and "follow" away?

When I was growing up it seemed there was some ideal of adulthood mentioned more than once, the parental lessons of life actually being for learning, and that words can have as much consequences as actions, or that role models are actually people who own up to this.  What happened to that?  How many of us are so riddled with anxiety about the very idea of pointing out what's gone awry that there are not enough meds in the world to ward off fears of bomb threats and death threats and having to go into hiding? How many of us can afford enough private bodyguards to do that and would it prove futile in a world of corrupted judges, politicians, police, militia and goodness knows who else? 

Oh, look at Hester up on her soapbox high horse now, so self-righteous and sanctimonious and shaming! If my anxiety fell for that accusation it would be a sure sign of being psychologically damaged by those who've made narcissistic gaslighting professionally seamless and airtight.  The vampiric glamour spell - (invite me in, invite me in) -  the cult leader's charm gradually leading to the Kool-aid elixir - is just such an incredible grift that so many, supposedly afraid of conspiracy theories fall for the conspiracy of, and it's just such an obvious Emperor's New Clothes scenario, that no wonder the grifter is so self-congratulatory!  (Look at me, Mommy!  I pulled it off!)  The outlandishness is simply mind-spinning, another trait of how great in more than one sense of the word, that the manipulation can be.  The flip of the coin is to play the victim of a witch hunt card themselves when others try to hold them accountable.

Unfortunately, thanks to the proliferation of domestic terrorism against libraries, schools, drag, immigrants, reproductive health clinics, and transgender healthcare, etc., this so-called culture war is apparently succeeding because there are no common sense measures being put into place to stop the insanity. By purposely lying, and "othering", the frenzied alliances are seeing their power and finances grow exponentially at the price of the environment and brutalized citizens. Is this didactic hypocritical cataclysm just too much of a hassle to deal with by say, gee, shutting down an inciting website? Um -public menace - anyone?  Somebody? 

Listen, right now Hester is hearing a multitude of other Letter A's pleading Jesus, God, Almighty, what the---?  Hester pops another Clonazepam and asks what we, with our increasing micro-plastic-infiltrated brains, are intelligently capable of strategizing to fight for anyway?