If I'm not my feelings, what am I?

I have terrible nervousness: there’s this interview today for a job I really want, and I've not really prepared. I find myself hungover, exhausted and already late. But first, before I leave for that interview, I have to talk to the person I’m working for and admit to, apologise about, and solve, a pretty serious mistake I have made at this place of work… oh, and, this manager terrifies me because they loathe me. Or I suspect they loathe me. I’m pretty sure they loathe me. Oh, and, all of these things are all gently laid on top of my partner of 10 years telling me yesterday they wanted out of our relationship.

These feelings are strong, they threaten to take me apart, like those horses which used to rend in twain condemned prisoners in olden times…. but all they are is feelings - none of these events are happening to me as I write. But that’s the off-the-wall anxiety which rises: galloping, uncontrollable horses, this time dragging my coach willy-nilly, throwing me around in the back, as I try to get some purchase on anything. To stop it I’d have to climb out of the coach and onto the moving horses, at which point I’d remember I don’t have a great track record with the gentlest, laziest of horses, so I decide to stay put, at the mercy of beasts I cannot see and do not understand. Of course, they continue hurl me around inside this box while I try to find a way to stay upright and uninjured. And everything races away in spite of whatever mindgames I try in order to slow this shitshow down. It doesn't matter how many beautiful scenes I think of, or how much I tell myself it'll pass. 

And of course they are pretty much pointless, these feelings. They rise, often for reasons I cannot discern, and overwhelm me, obliterating whatever might be going on around me. Like so much techno in a 90s nightclub, it is dizzying and makes me want to lie down - I have sometimes gone to sleep in clubs, and it’s the best escape - better than going home - much quicker, sometimes sweetly immediate. Whatever is actually happening, whatever this is, I just want to lie down and curl up and be left until the the human race has finished its destruction of the planet, or whatever other important task it is applying itself to at the moment.

At other times, though, I am keenly aware of what’s causing it - missing a bus, forgetting to bring some piece of paper with me, not being able to find my belt. It used to be bigger things, and they still hit the spot - realising I am in the wrong city for a job I’ve put in on the wrong day of my diary, missing a plane, hearing my sister has been shot. But since struggling my way out of the miasma of the early post-my-murdered-sister days I am very easily sent into a state of sweaty, sweary-yet-catatonic self-hatred that helps man nor beast, and by the smallest of things.

I am loathe to write about it at all as anxiety is the psychological difficulty de nos jours, but it was only just over two years ago, well into my forties, that I realised anxiety has been a life-long companion. I feel absurd saying that the feelings of horror I experienced going every day to primary school, travelling as a young adult, struggling to lectures at university, going out to shows as an agent and on and on and on throughout the entire lumpy tapestry of my life, that those feelings never registered as anxiety when I was enduring them. I didn’t even think to consider them and then dismiss them as normal, they were not notable enough to be considered and categorised. They were, essentially, who I was so I put them down to simple misery and incapacity.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of misery and incapacity in stock, it’s just there is also a whole set of floors dedicated to anxiety in here of which I was utterly unaware - I didn’t even notice the doors to it. And, by being unaware, by writing it off, powerfully suppressing it, I’ve never really learnt how to deal with it, in spite of it grabbing the wheel of the vehicle of my life so much of the time. Indeed, it grabs the wheel more and more and is, therefore, rendering me surprisingly unuseful these days… even for me.

It struck me recently that I made the mistake of believing, as the youngest, that whatever my brother and sister did was normal and I should just emulate them, even when the things they did terrified me. This was partly because they were older than me when we were young…. if you see what I mean, and partly because I’m a terrible scaredy cat and it had to be overcome or I’d still be in my mother’s kitchen, keening. Everything terrified me and that terror is and was a terrible liar, some of the time, telling me I can’t do things (ask for directions, audition, ask a friend for help) when I can. Of course, it’s the same feeling as when the fear is entirely accurate - when it’s about jumping off high things or driving an HGV with no training whatsoever.

What I think I managed to do to myself when I was six and when Dad died, was use sheer force of will to overcome these terrible feelings, because I knew I should. I was, as children are repeatedly told they are, resilient. I guess that some of those kids therefore attempt to be whatever resilient is to the adults around them in order to make everyone happy, or at least I suspect that’s what I did. I mean, other people were processing through being human in a satisfactory way, and my father’s death was no excuse for not managing perfectly well. My all-consuming anxiety was just an internal reaction of mine and, therefore, it was irrelevant.

And if it was irrelevant then, imagine how irrelevant it is now: he’s nearly 41 years gone, but even when I was eight, even then, it was not a valid reason for my feelings. So I stuffed them down and belittled them and held myself in utter contempt for feeling them, even if I did manage to overcome them. And when I didn’t, then I knew I was beyond contempt. When, as a kid, I couldn’t stay at a friend’s or go to a party or, a bit older, go and live in Latin America rather than Spain for my degree, I knew I was worthless. I now understand that I was veering wildly from overwhelming anxiety to all-enveloping self-hatred.

Of course, dear reader, I am reaping the whirlwind. I mean, I always have reaped the whirlwind, but the great thing about life is that it can always be worse and often it is, the cheeky little bastard. Even now I know what these feelings seem to be, the words for them, largely because of the number of people talking about anxiety, it doesn’t really help. If you’d asked me, before I realised it was anxiety, that if I’d had a word for these feelings, did I think it would help? I think I would have said yes, it would. So now I’m terribly perplexed.

What compounds it is that there is a fashion to say we are not our feelings, our feelings keep changing, as do we, but we are not those feelings. And it’s a lovely idea, but I wonder, if I am not my feelings, what am I? I’m my knee injury and my childhood in the countryside; I’m that time I went drinking with three men I met on a train and my first boyfriend’s love of The The; I’m a city-dweller and a stilt-walker and all that, but really, am I not also my feelings? I guess I feel the denial of my feelings, so powerful they have more-or-less structured my life, is the denial of my self. If I condemn myself for being swayed by these feelings, I am condemning myself. The fashion to say I am not my feelings - they just come and go - damns me for having created a life in the shadow of the anxiety (and other negative feelings) created, or at the very least exacerbated, by my father’s death. It says again, I should be better, I should be stronger and happier, and most of the time I think that’s right.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I want to say, give that little kid a break - she was, essentially, those feelings, and her inability to deal with them has left this grown woman with coping tactics that are so poor they don’t even qualify as such, but they are all that she has. If I am not my anxiety which has created the rococo route which has led me here I really do not know what I am, and maybe that’s the point. If there is a point. Was I making a point? Frankly, I’m not sure, but I guess I’ll post this anyway.