I don’t remember the first time I felt fear, but I do remember the first time that I felt excruciating pain.

My parents and I were at a family and friends gathering which had convened at a canal side pub called The Globe on the outskirts of my hometown of Leighton Buzzard. Out back, there’s tables filled with people, dogs running around having a great dog time, and a kids’ climbing frame. In hindsight, I should have probably focused my attention on any of these three things, but no. Instead, what caught my eye was a long, flat plastic strap.

Curious as to what this piece of plastic does, I went over to it. Lying on the floor amidst all its potential, it begged me to pick it up. As I bent and twisted it around in my hands, I began imagining all the uses it could have. Being four or five at the time, they weren’t particularly practical. Leads for the dogs. A rope for the barges. Some sort of crude implement to attack my toddler sister with. Regardless of its eventual use, I knew I needed it for something in the near future.

What happened next taught me three things. First, physics. When you tug on the foundations of a heavy weight, you may destabilise it. Secondly, concrete slabs landing on an unprotected foot will break bones. Finally, it’s not a great idea to tug on random objects when you don’t know what will happen.

A quarter of a century later, and I’m sat on a bench a couple of metres away from the scene of the crime, lemonade in hand. Where once there was gravel, now there’s a suspicious looking concrete slab. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought it was whistling guiltily while avoiding to make eye contact.

I’m sat here because a year ago, I had another accident. I tripped over the root of a tree, and it’s taken me twelve whole months to get back up.

The tree in question is hideous. The bark breaks and flakes like water-starved river bed. Growing it out of it aren’t branches, but deformed tumorous protrusions that contort unnaturally, seemingly horrified by their own image. The vines that constrict it are black and rotten. Even on a glorious sunny day, the tree’s gangly growths block out the light, eclipsing the surrounding area in darkness and suffocating all life trying to grow beneath. Everywhere around its feet are the roots, rearing up like some pit of vipers desperate to sink their fangs into unsuspecting prey.

But I have one in my hand.

It wriggles, it struggles, it grinds its gnarly serrated surface against my skin, gouging deep into my flesh and seems to pause only into the relish in the warm sensation of my blood running down its dark, gaunt body.

But I’ve got the fucker.

That tree is my anxiety. It is all my fears. If my life were a house, this bastard would take up my whole garden, gloating about its immunity to chainsaws while I spend my days cowering under the kitchen table, desperate to avoid its gaze.

In April last year, I had a nervous breakdown. At the time, I thought anxiety was relatively new to me. I’d had problems in the past with depression, but I’d got past that. I didn’t understand why or how this had happened to me. I saw no cause. All I knew is that I’d gone to bed one evening and this massive, ugly tree was there to greet me in the morning.

My first reaction was to chop it down. If anxiety catches you unaware, you will attempt to deal with it like any other immediate threat. You fight it with whatever you have to hand. So I rushed in with an axe and threw myself into a battle with it.

It did not go well. I chopped, I hacked, and I slashed, but the tree still stood. Every time I took a chunk out, it’d grow right back. Each blow took more and more out of me, but I could not stop. I became obsessed with the demise of this tree. But despite my best efforts, the tree remained, and all I achieved was hacking up myself.

I was ruined. I didn’t understand how it was still standing. My confidence was in ruins. My self-belief evaporated. The only trace of my motivation was a blunted axe resting against an indifferent tree.

Fear had poured into every aspect of my life. Relationships, work, plans for the future, friendships, sex, health, relaxing, enjoying myself, things I love doing, writing, any sort of social interactions – all of this and much more became coated in a tangible, thick layer of mental dread, much of which I’m still severely affected by to this day. It’s immobilising. It’s gut wrenching. And for the longest time, I felt it was more than I could ever hope to contend with.

But I hung on. I began investing my time into not attacking the tree, but understanding it. What I now know is that this wasn’t something that appeared overnight, but had been growing for years. Without knowing it, its roots had dug deep into my subconscious, distorting my thoughts and fuelling its rise. It had even been growing above ground in plain sight for months, possibly years, and I’d just ignored it.

Not anymore.

I see now that to get rid of this bastard tree, I have to take it up by the roots. I have to dig deep, and find all the ways it has intertwined itself within me. To do that, I must first understand it. I have to work with it. And once I know the full extent, when I’ve got the whole thing figured out, only then can I finally get rid of it.

What lies ahead for me is a journey. I’m just at the start of the road, and I know its going to be a hard one to walk. For the longest time, I’ve been apprehensive about walking it, and procrastinated endlessly. But I have to. I must. This is the single biggest obstacle I’ve had to overcome in my life, and I’m committed to defeating it. For the first time in over a year, I feel confident. I feel like I’m on top of it. I’ve finally found the courage to defeat it.

And that’s why you are reading this now. This is the first in a series of posts I intend to write about anxiety. I’m going to go into how this all came about. I’ll cast a spotlight on each of these fears, and shove them out in the open. I’ll write about how I’ve attempted to deal with it in the past, and what I’m doing now to beat it. And hopefully, by the end, all there will be where this tree once stood is some dirt.

Or a bench.

Or a goddamn shed I built out of the wood of the fucker.

Or, at the very least, a concrete slab, just like the one I’m looking at now. The one that broke my foot. The one that first taught me pain and, subsequently, taught me fear. It taught me that curiosity is bad. It taught me that you shouldn’t pull on what you don’t understand.

Fuck that slab, and fuck this tree.

I have the root in my hand.

I’m going to pull it.