This feeling is temporary.

Anxiety presents itself as weather that has always been here and always will be.

That is the exhausting part — not the fear so much as its claim to permanence, the way it arrives sounding less like a mood and more like a forecast.

Look back at a bad stretch from a year ago and you will find you cannot reproduce it now, not on purpose. Not because you defeated it. Because states have a shape, and shapes have edges, even when you are standing in the middle of one and can't see them.

It shifts inside a single day too, usually while you are washing up, and usually without announcing anything.