Now wash your hands

This past month I tried something new.

I tried breathing.

Not regular normal in and out breathing type stuff, I do that every day. I mean concentrated inhales and exhales, through the nose and out the mouth.

Sometimes when I did it I closed by eyes and rhythmically pressed the tips of my finger and thumb together. I did it to try and create a tiny pocket of zen in an otherwise hectic and chaos filled head. A head in which sometimes, I feel so fucking mad at people, for no reason. A head in which I feel judgmental as fuck, looking around and laugh internally at other people I feel have less of a handle on this shit. A head in which I feel jealous. Sickly jealous. So jealous I think about destroying the things they love, and leaving a hole in there lives, the likes of which I have in mine. It's a feeling that ebbs and flows into me as regularly as the ebbs and flows of my depression, my anxiousness or my complete malaise, but of all these feelings it's the one I'm most ashamed of. It's the one that's the least like me, and in order to reclaim myself from it, I decided to try breathing.

Not regular normal in and out breathing type stuff, I do that every day. I mean concentrated inhales and exhales, through the nose and out the mouth.

Each time I took a breathe in, I focused on the acid venom spite and hate I'd just created. Holding the breathe inside my chest was like placing a sick baby in an incubator, then watching it emerge on an exhale, happier and healthier, scar tissue free. I practiced this each time someone said something that stoked this feeling. Whenever I felt my face scrunch, or my palms get sweaty. I practised this breathing whilst I lay in my bed, thinking it over and over and over and over the thing she'd said at the supermarket checkout four days ago, trying to dislodge this black-tar seed from inside me and blow it out making it disappear.

For the most part it was working, until eight days ago, I was sat in a car heading down the motorway, harbouring one of these thoughts, like a poisoned sea-anemone clinging to the fibers of my thoughts. We stopped at a service station and I went to the mens room, and sat on the lid of the toilet crying. I was trying to practice the breathing, but I couldn't stop. So I was crying but breathing, crying but breathing, crying but breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, just breathing, just breathing, just breathing, just breathing, just breathing breathing and smiling, smiling and breathing. I felt the weight release, the light inkling of a euphoria, the sea-anemone come unstuck, the venom neutralise, the light getting brighter and the colours coming back as I let the bullshit go.

When I left the toilet cubicle I saw a sign, and it read:


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