Everyone, and anyone who had classes with me in high school, has seen me have anxiety, but there are only eight or nine people in my life that have seen me have a full on panic attack. The person who saw my worst panic attack lives in New York, and surprisingly, it wasn’t Jeremy. Jeremy has helped me develop some of the most helpful coping mechanisms, so he’s never seen me at my worst, my freshmen year–a year where everyone writes off anxiety for hormones so it’s impossible to understand what is happening inside your body, inside your brain, and inside your soul. My anxiety became a punch line for jokes about puberty.

“Darling, be a dear and grab me a beer.”

She never knew what to say, so she went to the word hose looking for some inspiration.

I’ve been carrying a stranger’s phone number around in my pocket all week. I doubt that I will ever call it, but it’s presence is comforting—like a foldup map to the subway when your cellphone dies.

The phone number belongs to one Ms. Desiree Jeffers. I met her during a brief foray into Brooklyn, my first real individual endeavor into a new borough. Brooklyn is beautiful, but the part of town that I was in was difficult to navigate. It didn’t have street names on every corner, leaving me constantly wondering if I was as lost as the little blue dot on Google Maps seemed to think that I was.