Oh anxiety, you fashionable tyrant

My thinking cannot get past a crawl. I am jumpy, actually jumpy, as if someone has just leapt out at me while I was watching The Shining. I can barely think through a whole sentence at a time, let alone speak one out loud. My mind is skittering across a range of things, unable to light on any one of them. Ball-bearings on a tray. All of these things are pressing, all of them the stuff of the disasters in my life, past, present and future. I am exhausted yet the need for decisions chases me round my home, a superannuated toddler: what to wear, what to eat, whether to get dressed at all, is the nausea because I’m hungry? Should I take the rubbish out now? Should I wait until the bag is slightly fuller? Does it smell? Do I smell? I should check my emails. I cannot. I should check my phone. I cannot. I should leave. No way, José! You arch joker, José. It’s like you’ve never met me, José.

Days like these I can stand, the nausea rising, staring at the food I am taking with me for lunch and not be able to decide what container to put it in. Time passes. I stay there, either staring at the food or into the middle distance, where there is nothing and no one to help me. Something might distract me, a piece of paper bearing a task, say a bill to pay, so I’ll pick it up, and stare at that instead. To pay it I’d need to open my banking app and that means looking and my phone and my phone is choc-full of all the people in my life, those who love me, those who hate me, those who tolerate my gentle but decisive collapse into barely existing, though they probably experience my collapse as something else… Inefficiency? Forgetfulness? A beyond-maddening rudeness?

I’ll spend a while caught between the bill and my phone, strung up on the washing line of indecision, billowing in the breeze of unreachable opportunity, pegged there by the knowledge of my own inadequacy. I know indecision will ultimately kill you, my friend Karen told me that years ago when I was trying to decide something. We worked together at the time and I don’t remember what I couldn’t decide but I do remember not being able to decide. Karen was brilliant, offering the vital piece of advice, “Make a decision, any decision, because the indecision will kill you,” or words to that effect. And now, though I hear her voice in my head, and I know she is right, it seems I’m going to choose to grind to a halt on the highway of indecision, killed by my inability to decide how to get out of the way of the oncoming coach and horses as it makes its assault on my life via - in this moment - my considerable collection of plastic containers and my lunch.

Dad, of course, comes to mind. I suppose I think I might be a more capable, together person if he hadn't died. That his death did for me, rendering me unfit for purpose. And I do reflect that there are surely ways I'm like him that I might like more if he were here (I could not like my characteristics less*) and he might show me ways to at least cope with them, and maybe capitalise on them, even if I was never going to actually like them. But he is not here and he has not been here for so long it's like trying to read the writing on a faded till receipt, wondering what he might think or say or do.

Time passes. If I pick up the phone the crippling anxiety will blend to create a delicious concrete soufflé of guilt. They’re all in there in my phone, the people I let down corrosive week, after empty day, after curling, neglected minute. The guilt is heady: it might be solved. That close friend who has gradually slipped from my grasp into a life I presume (and hope) she loves. I wish her well, the voice inside me wishes her well, but the guilt that I have let her down in letting her go, that I let her down way before that, that our friendship was always simply burdensome for her, jiggles my guts and flips everything over into remorse. 

And remorse? It's not so nice, remorse. It’s something I can never quite get hold of well enough to shake out the wrinkles. It just buckles and twitches and smokes away, big, brown eyes staring at mine, always on the brink of tears.

Put down the phone. Put it down. You can’t solve that phone. It will never relent, it will always demand more of you than there is left, even if you scraped every corner of the labyrinthine bowl of your self, with its tubes and crevices. Even if I could find a tool to get all the juicy and flaky bits of myself out of my bowl of self, there will never be enough of me for my phone and everyone in there.

So, like you, I have to find ways of helping myself. Maybe you're doing better than me. My word, but I hope you are. I need to shift things a bit, but, of late, these things are not only inaccessible but almost impossible to discern. And so I stare, wishing everything would stop so I could step off. Often I'll start crying, which is obviously a waste of time. I'll only have to stop crying, drink extra water and get on with things.

Today, I can barely operate, and it's all because of how I'm feeling. Bizarrely, I could not give a toss about how I am feeling, as the fashionable thinking goes, it's just weather, how I'm feeling, but as happens so often these days, I am utterly overwhelmed by this feeling. It was only recently that I realised it was basically what has become known as general anxiety, and it feels like this:

1. I have terrible nervousness, as if I had a job interview today for a job I really want, for which I've not prepared, and I'm hungover, exhausted, and already late.

2. But first I have to go into my current job and admit to, apologise for, and then solve, a pretty serious mistake I have made at work, to a manager who terrifies me because they loathe me.

3. This is all gently laid on top of my partner of 10 years telling me yesterday they wanted to finish our relationship, not for anyone else, but just because they don't like me much any more.

Or things like that. You get the idea. Maybe this happens to you too. I hope it doesn't but the stats tell me it well might, my own dear mother tells me these feelings are pretty common. 

Now, none of these things is happening, no one is threatening my life, the police aren't about to arrest me and no lover is going to break my heart, which is one of the very clear benefits of being alone.

On days like these I fear that thinking about Dad will explode inside me but not actually kill me and I will limp on like all the best undead, polluting those around me and dropping limbs and emotions as I go.

I have tried to remodel and reshape and reduce and reform and retire parts my life in order to deal with it at all, a once pretty capable person rendered almost entirely useless by feelings which are attached to nothing. Sometimes they come when there is reason to be anxious, but mostly they just descend for shits and giggles. The smaller I make myself, the worse it gets. I was right, in the past, to fight and live in spite of what ever it was - I didn't know what it was - it was only last year I realised it's actually anxiety. It’s been there my whole life, but I didn’t know what it was, I just knew I was far less capable of a good time than many of those around me.

Am I angry with Dad for lifting the veil when I was only six, for lingering in a state of near-death and then disappearing inexplicably and for good? 

This morning I listened to Richard Bacon describing being put into a medical coma. It was harrowing stuff, the swiftness with which the doctors advised it and the speed with which they put him into it. He has been told that the first two days were touch-and-go, and then he started to rally, obviously: he was on the Today Programme talking about it, and it was wonderful to hear him to well and so present.

Am I angry with Dad that he didn't make it out of his medically induced coma? I know with my rational self that he did not want to die, he did not want to leave his kids and he did not want to leave his wife. Not at all. He was full of life. But he went anyway. Am I angry with him because he left me with with an unmanageable amount of anxiety which attaches itself to whatever it fancies like so many malicious and debilitating barnacles? I do not, dear reader, have a scooby. I can only guess, and I have spent 40 years guessing which flawed and broken parts of me are because of what he did to us by not doing a Richard Bacon. However, what I do believe is that if I was an anxious child before his death, and I think I was, then losing him will have exacerbated that, damn him. Damn him, damn him. How I love him. How I miss him.

And here I am, still staring at things, unable to get on with what which constitutes life and which is necessary for the keeping the wherewithal in place. I have the time to reflect, stuck as I am, that in the terrible old days, days far better than these, I used to just do things anyway, sometimes losing my ability to cope in public, right in the middle of things, terrifyingly, possibly on another continent or on a date in one of the pubs near my home. And then, a while back, I decided that this was not working very well, that I needed to rethink and consider other ways to survive, and so I started reducing things. 

This turned out to be a rather big mistake. 

These days it's called self-care, but for me it's turned out to be lighting the longest fuse imaginable which will ultimately lead to the bomb hidden under my ability to cope. So, these days, my energies are focused on trying to put out the fuse. I can't just defuse the bomb because mostly I have no idea where my ability to cope is any more, and it conceals the bomb. When I have the energy, I don my cartoon self and run like Wylie Cayote through the canyon, the spark always ahead of me; I stumble, I swear, but I never catch it. And I really don't know how to put it out even if I did catch it. And I don't - whisper it - think I will ever put it out. 

One of the most exciting things I've learnt in life is that you think things are bad, you can't imagine them being worse, and then suddenly they are. You pass through a door and you are in a place you could never have imagined, and it is terrible. You hear the hissing of the fuse and you have to find a way to redouble your efforts because the explosion will certainly do for you and, even if it doesn't this is certainly no place to live.


*Of course I could and, given time, I probably will. I just like the idea that I couldn't.