I am Jack's overactive amygdala

I walk down the street…I either walk or I ride the subway. All my worries and obsessions are dissolved in ceaseless observation. I am no longer my own thoughts, the things that I imagine or remember, just what meets my eyes and ears, a spy on a secret mission to record and collect it all. I used to check my phone for messages every few minutes. I used to lower my head and scrunch my shoulders, caught in a toxic bubble of gloom, traversing an endless tunnel of mid-morning anxiety. Anxiety was my shadow, my guardian, and my double. It kept up with me no matter how fast I walked. It stood beside me as I went down an escalator, whispering into my ear. It turned the mild dizziness I got from my medication into vertigo and nausea. There was a morbid magnetism to the muzzle of the train when it came from the depths of the tunnel into the station. There was a voice in my ear, inside my head, far back at the nape of the neck, and in my throbbing temples. Now there’s no longer one voice but many, a flood of voices, coming always from the outside and as immediate as the things I see, the people going by, the noise of traffic.