An Exhausting Matter

A vignette of a college student besieged by undiagnosed social anxiety disorder.

She arrived in the classroom a few minutes early and sat, slightly uncomfortable with her being, until the other students arrived and finally the professor.

He was elderly and experienced and from the head of the table he began to speak calmly, apparently without the concern that he would search and find nothing in his mind and his mouth.

Occasionally from either side of the long table a hand was raised, and a student was called on. She always looked at them, at their healthy regard for themselves, and hated the incongruous pounding of her heart as she considered such sounds emerging from her own mouth. What separated them, distinguished them from her? -- a simple raising of the wrist and an extension of the fingers!

Her heart was still steaming along, too fast when she looked at the clock and saw that the class was three-quarters of the way over. She had to find her courage soon, very soon.

She sat perfectly still, her eyes avoiding all others and her heart beating ever-faster. Come! It does not matter if you say something, because whatever it is you will have said will be soon forgotten-- even if it is rather stupid--!

This rationality did nothing to help her body and its expression of stress and she looked at the students as they faced the professor and then at the professor himself and she thought, if I say something now I irrevocably change the progression of speech, and perhaps the expression of meaning, and is that really what I want, to be able to change the sequence of of events-- possibly to its detriment-- especially when it involves a group of other people, as this does, now?

And even though she came to no conclusion before he ended his pause she raised her hand like someone raises a white flag-- quickly, desperately-- and he acknowledged her with a half-limp hand gesture.

She spoke the words she had been thinking of in a slightly different order and her voice did not shake as she thought it would but still her insides roiled.

She finished speaking abruptly-- she practically tossed the words onto the table in front of him-- and he analyzed them from where they landed. His response was brief and he paused again before turning over a paper and resuming steady speech. Nothing of utmost significance was unearthed.

She sat back in her chair and once her heartbeat had slowed she realized, with a strange sense of neutrality, that nothing had changed.

That is not just to say that the students around her had resumed their slightly blank stares in the direction of the professor and his teachings, or that the professor was once again talking, or that the scene, in its entirety, was just as it had been.

For she, too, was just as she had been. She had jumped-- she had spoken-- but now she was back on the ledge of silence and to leap again would be an entirely new occasion, as though she had never jumped, at all, in her life. A self-enslaved Sisyphus, she thought wryly with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the professor’s white beard and his slow-moving mouth.

As he spoke his final words of the class she could not but think, tiredly, and a bit sadly, of the strain of free will.

Reviews

[Iain L. Luen]

I first have to ask: Why the mature rating? It limits the audience. This is a wonderful work that should be available to all.
The visuals are wonderful. I love the words being thrown out on the table. I often get flustered and blurt out nonsense. My only salvation is my love for knowledge, so I will always join Sisyphus and cheat death.

[Abigail Livingston]

I changed it! I initially felt it was a sensitive enough topic for some that it might warrant an older audience, but I since changed my mind. Thanks for your review! I appreciate the feedback on the visuals.