Two Questions: Part Two

~ Superfluous G ~ Leave a comment

 

This post is a continuation of last week’s post, Two Questions, which you can read here.

I am under siege.

Anxiety is the enemy general, and it marches not with knights. Anxiety marches with the forces of darkness. Orcs sap at my walls. Demons bang at my gates. Hellspawn rain down from above. My towns burn. My fields lie barren. Every night, my defences are tested, and the night is long.

This past year, there’s been ups and downs. Times like I feel when I’m winning, only to see the horde double in size. But when I climb the tallest tower, when I look beyond the mass of filth which surrounds me, I see it.

Just over the horizon.

Dawn is coming.

Critical thinking – the mental discipline of arriving at answers and solutions that transcend bias, ego, and hubris – is a subject of great depth. But at its core is a simple tenant: question everything, especially yourself.

Anxiety excels at that last bit. In the last twelve months, I’ve walked through my own mental hell. At first, it overwhelms. You fight it, but to no avail. It’s when you learn to embrace it that the relationship changes.

Of course, this took me a while to figure out.

After the events surrounding my 30th birthday, I thought a couple of weeks off was all I needed, and I’d slip back into life unscathed. Life had other plans.

I arrived back at work just in time to be told my position was at threat of redundancy. It was the second of three times this would happen to me in 2015.

The first time was in February, which I survived, but barely. It was a pyrrhic victory that put my brain in the shredder.

I was yet to appreciate how much of a burden work had become. But I could feel how it was taking its toll; the unease sat in my stomach like a bucket of lead.

At the same time, I’d been financially supporting my girlfriend for pretty much the length of our relationship – how would we cope without me working? What would people think of my failure? What if it was just the start of a long slide into poverty and destitution?

Physical symptoms of anxiety ratcheted up. Tension headaches wracked my brain, tense muscles felt like they could snap, and I could feel everything. Every twitch, every pain, every heartbeat.

The fear of death subsided as the fear of living like this overtook it.

I scraped a deal where I got made redundant, but moved into a new position with the swanky title of Editor-at-Large.

On balance, this was probably the most idiotic move I could have made. In saving my paycheque, I signed up for not only the editor’s chair for my own publication, but another magazine on top as well as putting together special reports.

I’d traded in one set of spinning plates for a one-man circus.

Not wanting to take my foot off the pedal on the road to self-annihilation, I quickly jumped from one crisis to another as my relationship crashed and burned.

You’ll have to forgive me for skipping over the details here, but that story deserves its own post. The headline though is that it was all me. Anxiety destroyed my relationship. It continues to suck at my confidence with the opposite sex. I’ve barely spoken to a woman since, and intimacy terrifies me. I feel worthless: nothing to offer, and about as attractive and appealing as a London sewer after national curry day.

Anxiety has left me sexually redundant.

I was left alone in our flat with only memories for company.

But a man doing three jobs in one has no time to reflect. Instead, my life became a report profiling 100 up-and-coming financial shinpads.

I worked on that bastard from burnt-out sunrise to sleepless night for two months.

Depression moved into the spare room, and soon I was smoking weed and drinking every day, with heroic quantities of cocaine as a cherry on top.

I was a burned out mess. I had been for months. I’m still unsure how I managed to put pen to paper at all last year – although I suspect the answer begins with c and ends with up your nose. When my boss came to see me, I expected a firing squad. Instead, he gave me a two-month paid holiday and a £5,000 golden goodbye.

In the void of work, the penny finally dropped.

For months, I’d been working on autopilot. A panicked autopilot, far too busy nursing a hangover and racking up lines in the cockpit to invest himself in the business of flying anything. When the work stopped, nobody bothered to tell him.

“READ THOSE EMAILS,” it’d scream, “READ THEM NOW OR WE’RE ALL DOOMED! DOOMED I TELL YOU!”

“But there are no emails, there’s no work!”

“READ THEM GODDAMN IT OR I CRASH THIS FUCKING PLANE! AAARRGRGRGHGH, GIVE ME MORE WHISKEY!”

It’d take three months before my autopilot finally came to an end, which is a long time to observe the impact it had on my life. But as much of the topics I’m gleefully skipping over here, that’s a story for another time.

Those two months were supposed to be a holiday. Instead, it was a cerebral dissection of the self. Open heart surgery while I float ethereally above.

But in the darkness, I found what I thought I’d lost. As the dark clouds of depression gathered and thundered above me, the light that ignited in my last depression reappeared. I had assumed anxiety had long extinguished it, but there it was, burning brightly.

The beacon of hope. Dawn is coming.

During this time, I began to further explore anxiety, drawing on CBT and neuroscience around anxiety. It is here that I started to lay the foundations of the recovery I’m now on – to actually begin to understand the depth of my condition.

What I came to realise is that this wasn’t something that just came out of the blue, driven by a health scare and stress from work. This was something far more insidious. It had been brewing for years, its roots deep in the hazy memories of my childhood and teenage years. It affects me in ways I hadn’t even realised: socially, sexually, the very essence of who I am.

Since then, I’ve had a number of epiphanies – realisations about myself, anxiety, and the way of the universe that have given me great strength. The most powerful of these has been the nature of change, which I’ll talk about next week. Once realised, I embraced change.

Fast forward a few months, and I’m back in my home town, living with one of my oldest friends in a very laid back manner. I’m surrounded by family and friends, and I remain overwhelmed at the support people have shown me in the past twelve months.

Depression said “my job here is done”, and buggered off. In its place, it left me the present of resolve. The ethos of not waiting, but to act.

I’m four weeks into a year’s long plan to not drink or do any coke, and doing well. I work on my own terms at my own speed, and have people lining up to work with me. I’ll soon be doing CBT, and will this week I commit to a mindfulness programme with the enthusiasm I know it needs.

And then there’s this blog. I haven’t properly written for myself in years – my fears and insecurities robbing me of my greatest love.

But no more.

Through this blog, I get to explore anxiety. But more crucially, I get to tap into my long dormant writing self. Creativity in of itself is something brave, fearless, and honest. You are naked and vulnerable, yet there you are, torch in hand and shouting insults into the void.

It is everything that anxiety is not.

Writing is my siege breaker. Every word erodes the deep grooves caused by the river of shit. Every sentence is a sharpened sword ready to plunge into my demons. Every post is a cavalry charge into the horde.

The siege continues, but the tables have turned. I no longer feel burdened by anxiety, and instead see it as the necessary stepping stone towards the peace I strive to find. It is something to be understood, not feared. That understanding is the light that will chase away its darkness.

I will beat the siege.

 

Thanks for reading. I’ve opened up social accounts for this blog, which you can find to your left. If you enjoyed this post or took something from it, please feel free to like and follow the accounts or to share this blog so others may enjoy it too.

The fun introductory stuff is over. Next week, the blog begins for real as we get into the nature of change.

Two Questions – Part One

~ Superfluous G ~ Leave a comment

Panic sets in, and my body responds accordingly.

My skin sears red hot, my vision tunnels, and my heart does its best supernova impression to the horrified audience of one.

Alarm bells ring, and my head splits as cortisol-soaked blood gushes in. All safety gauges are red.

Some ingrained part of me says I can outrun the fear. No use; my legs disagree. I have no idea where to go anyway – where do I run when I’m about to die?

I manage to flip myself mid-air onto the sofa; an intimate meeting with the radiator averted. Upon impact, my brain superheats as a million thoughts of doom descend upon it.

Emergency shut down follows.

Breathe.

Oxygen floods into my lungs. Niagara Falls descending on the Great Fire of London.

Breathe deeply.

I draw in a long, hard, deep breath of air. Time stands still. The exhale is a nuclear fire.

Again.

All processes suspended; all services cancelled. For some time, I am nothing more than a glorified iron lung, keeping this empty husk in the land of the living.

Breath by breath, I exhale the glut of terror that had filled my lungs.

A neuron fires, and I begin to reawaken.  I feel the sweat cooling on my skin, my arms. I sense how wet my clothes are. My vision calms and the walls return to their original position.

As madness swirls above, I feel only one thing: serenity.

In the calm, I came to the realisation that I didn’t have an aneurysm after all. The ability to rationalise was beginning to resurface, and I settled on the more accurate self-diagnosis of a panic attack.

Out of the ether came two questions.

The first, what just happened?

This was the eye of the storm.

I’d been redlining for some time, unintentionally brewing the hurricane of anxiety which would lay waste to my life. The candle wasn’t just burning at both ends; it’d been doused in gasoline and thrown in a volcano.

In the past week, I’d come back from a work trip to the US. The trip itself was great. What got me was the jetlag.

I started in Indiana, and crossed back a time zone to Chicago, driving three and a half hours through heavy Windy City traffic with a lack of sleep and a bad hangover. Chicago airport for six hours then hopping forward six hours – nine of which were in the air – I landed at Heathrow at around 9 in the morning. It’d be another six hours before I finally got home to Cardiff.

Hypnogogic hallucinations seeped in on that first sleep back in the UK, and panic set in that I was finally on the open road to schizophrenia. Each time I went to nod off, another round of audio hallucinations would appear, invoking something guttural and primal within me – the twilight zone terror between sleep and wakefulness.

I woke a nervous wreck.

I should have taken a break.

Instead, my 30th birthday and a week packed with hedonistic joy loomed, so I crammed. Four days, fifteen hours a day, back to back.

The above unravelling, the starting gun for a nervous breakdown, came the moment I filed my report.

Working for a startup may look like an easy gig to some, but the entrepreneurial life is no cakewalk. Limited resources, a small yet close knit team who rely heavily on you, and the ever-present threat of the company folding and it all being for nothing weigh heavily. Subsequently, you push yourself, and I’d been doing that for three years.

I’d bitten off more than I could chew, and was salivating for seconds. I’d become a professional plate spinner – burning myself out running back and forth constantly. Rather than reducing my burden, I just kept adding plates. I felt like I was perpetually falling towards burnout and failure, and the only thing that would stop me from hitting the ground was just powering forward.

I’m an expert at winging it. I learn on the fly, and adapt to the times. Sometimes, I move so fast that I miss things – important things – but I’m so good at winging it that I normally stumble into success anyway. What I’m not is someone who’s ever been hand-picked for success. I wasn’t groomed to lead. Subsequently, when I found myself in that position anyway, I didn’t realise that I’d set myself up to fail. The skillset was incomplete, and what was missing was the most important part of all. As I took on more responsibility, I neglected my own wellbeing.

A fish in a river which encounters a rock has two options. You can flow with the river around it, or you can charge straight for the rock and cave your head in.

I went with the latter. I’d subscribed to the philosophy of pressure creating diamonds. I thought I could endure it. I thought wrong.

I’d get up in the morning, and instantly feel the pressure. Working from home most days, I hardly ever saw anyone. Instead, I’d procrastinate, immobilised by my ever-growing to-do list, which seemed evermore insurmountable as each precious second ticked away. Eventually, panic would drive me to work. The sub-standard result was fuelled not by desire and ambition, but fear and adrenaline.

Subsequently, when the day was done, I wasn’t. I couldn’t unwind. There was always something left to do; a whip of failure to lash myself with. Any attempts to relax or brighten myself up were overcast with dark thoughts and over-analysis orbiting around a stone of fear lodged deep in my head.

Even when I’d spend some time with my girlfriend, or went out to see people, or go out for a bike ride, I wouldn’t really be there. I’d still in work mode, checking my phone for press releases and reports, writing and receiving emails. What I was actually doing was panicking about what I had been unable to tackle up to the moment I got back into bed where I could slip into a duvet-coated coma of dread.

Rinse.

Repeat.

Remember my wax-filled volcano from earlier? The more stress I threw in, the more it would bubble over into a river of waxy shit that oozed out of it, carving out deep grooves in my mind. Worse, these grooves don’t flow anywhere – they just go around in a circle and back into the volcano.

This is how anxiety develops.

The more you pump into that volcano and spend time swimming in the river of shit, the deeper that river bed becomes. It gradually but surely changes the way you think and react into destructive, terror-ridden mental loops.

Consequently, when other things come along, your brain deals with it the same way: you panic. When anxiety found something else to focus on – my health – all hell broke loose.

It started innocently enough. Sleep apnoea – snoring where you can cut off your breathing during your sleep. Untreated, it can lead to poor sleep, and in turn stress, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and death.

There’s various ways to deal with it, the main one being to lose weight, but I struggled to change my habits Stressed already and driven to cover up for it with a number of destructive behaviours, including drink, drugs, and fast food,  I couldn’t commit to it.

Failure came waltzing through the door. And there, hand-in-hand, cheek-to-cheek, was its dance partner: anxiety.

Then came tinnitus.

Anyone who’s ever been to a gig knows tinnitus – the constant ringing in your ears. But what if it never stops?

The first week was a living nightmare. It’s when you realise that the noise isn’t some old TV on standby or a CB radio but coming from inside your head that the walls of reality start to break down. I couldn’t sleep. Every time I noticed it, my mind would race with new ways it was the herald of my demise, and I noticed it all the time.

To this day, it torments me – a complete inability to enjoy a silent moment. As I write this, I can hear the wind blowing the blinds, the clicking and clacking of the keyboard, the buzz of fans, the traffic in the background. Above all these things, I hear the whine.

It relentlessly chips away at me. It keeps me on edge. It brings on attacks. It reminds me that I’m not alright, that I’m going mad, and its ever-present discordant tone mirrors the one within me, making me fear I’ll never beat anxiety.

I try to cover it up – music, TV, games, making noises to myself to break up its piercing tone, doing all I can to focus my attention on other sounds. Some days, it works. Some days, it’s too loud, and not even metal on full blast can drown it out.

Other high pitch sounds have become my kryptonite. When I see someone survive an explosion on TV and come to, their head ringing, or when I hear something electronic kicking out some high pitch while, it combines to make a brutal cacophony that heightens my tension and unearths the buried anguish of a hundred sleepless nights.

That’s when it’s at its worst. When the world has gone to sleep and silence fills the streets, I am left alone with its baneful wail – water torture for the ears.

It would be a year before doctors decided that my hearing was fine – much better than average as it turns out – and it was all due to my stress.

I’m much more at peace with it now that I realise it’s just a symptom, but a year is a long time for a creative mind fuelled by anxiety to go to work.

As far as my brain was concerned, tumours, mini-strokes, and aneurysms were definitely the cause. This was further compounded by the physical side effects of anxiety – which I spoke about in my last post – manifesting. Of course, I didn’t realise it was anxiety. I thought it was every other condition in the goddamn book building up to a climactic plethora of fuckery that would leave me – at best – a broken dying heap in a hospital.

Every thought: doomed. Every pain: terminal. Every moment: fatal.

Fear had bled out into every aspect of my life.

I was failing hard at work. I’d become increasingly wracked by social phobias. My relationship was falling to pieces. If there was something to fear, I feared it. The ability to feel love, happiness, or anything positive had been corrupted by anxiety and hollowed out.

I’d look in the mirror, and where once there was confidence, all I saw was a broken mess. My sense of self and all I draw strength was gone as my brain increasing swam circles in the river of shit, escalating an endless loop of stress and angst.

Until the volcano blew.

The landscape had changed. The fear that had been building up now lay strewn on the surface – a testament to my unintentional self-destruction.

And so, in this post-nervous breakdown world came the second question: what now?

 

I’ll be going into deeper analysis of some of the issues here: drinking, working, managing stress, drugs, fast food, relationships, health anxiety, social anxiety, and more in coming posts. But next week, part two where I’ll be talking about the year since, the road I’ve been on, and how I’ve come to understand that all of this was merely the tip of the iceberg. I promise it gets more positive.

Oh, and if you enjoyed this or took something from it, please do the like/share thing so others can too. Thanks!

Understanding Anxiety

~ Superfluous G ~ 3 Comments

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Here’s a point of view you won’t hear often: I am grateful for anxiety. Extremely grateful. Despite the misery it has inflicted on me, anxiety has given me – or rather forced upon me – the opportunity to actually get to know myself.

It’s been hell, but it has been entirely necessary. And, as I begin to pick up the pieces and slot myself back together, it feels solid. It doesn’t feel like some bandage I’m using to plaster over tectonic fault lines – the person that’s emerging from this feels like one built on strong foundations.

But before I really get into my own experience with anxiety – which I’ll be doing from next week – I thought it would be prudent to give an overview of what anxiety actually is.

You are flying. You’ve been flying for some time, and recently, all you’ve been flying through is storms. The plane is damaged, and the passengers terrified. All the warning lights have come on, and you have to land.

Those warning lights are anxiety. You can’t take your eye off them, and they won’t go away until you land. If you choose not to, you’ll crash and burn. If you do, your plane will be repaired, refilled, and you can get on your way.

This is why anxiety is a cloud with silver lining. The coming crash landing will terrify you to your core, and you’ll feel like a failure no matter what when you hit the tarmac.

But it’s just a moment.

There will be another, and one of them will be when you are back in the air, happily coasting along in autopilot without a care in the world.

Everything is temporary.

This is how I understand anxiety. But how it feels is an entirely different story altogether.

It’s late at night and you are by yourself in some quiet train station in the middle of nowhere. You’ve had a great night, but you are cold, tired, quite drunk, and just want your bed.

Waiting for the last ride out of there, you look down the platform for an update, but instead you see two figures advancing on you. With the hoods up, you can’t see any of their faces apart from their eyes.

Both sets are locked on you with intent.

One reaches into their pocket for something.

Moving faster now and mere metres away, your brain sees the threat and goes to react.

One of three things will now happen, entirely dependent on how you are hardwired. You’ll either leg it – the flight response – launch into the pair – the fight response – or stand there and let it happen to you – the freeze response.

The three Fs have ensured the survival of countless humans over the years, including undoubtedly yourself at some point. When you encounter an immediate threat, this ancient part of your brain reacts instantly. In most cases, you’ll have already begun to respond before the rest of your brain has even caught up. Your heart rate jumps, your blood fills with adrenaline and cortisol, your muscles tighten, and peripheral thought and vision drops to focus on the threat. Your body prepares itself to fight for its life.

But what if there are no muggers? What if there are no perceivable threats at all, yet your blood burns with battery acid anyway? What if this happened to you all the time and there’s no way to stop it?

People misunderstand anxiety. People hear the name, and recall sometime in the past where they have felt mild fear – going on a date, public speaking, a job interview – remember how they got through it, and dismiss it as cowardice. But that’s rational fear. It’s rational thinking. Anxiety is anything but.

Imagine a weasel, or a ferret if you will. For whatever reason, this elongated rodent has replaced your hair, and sits in a ball on your head. You have no idea where this damn weasel came from, and what’s more, you can’t get rid of it. You went to the doctor about it, and all they can do is give you some drugs to calm it down every now and then. But it won’t stay calm. It claws at your eyes. Its feet dig into your brain. It gouges chunk of your ears out, and wraps its body around your throat like a boa constrictor. And it flips out all the time. The weasel is a schizophrenic, it’s on a permanent acid trip, it’s not having a good time, and it wants you to know about it.

That ferret is your fear. You can’t reason with it. You can’t rationalise. It is rampant, uncontrolled, and in a constant panic. You try, of course. You tell yourself that you are safe. You attempt to force peace on a stormy ocean. You commit your whole self to bringing harmony to your terror-struck mind. But nothing ever works. Nothing soothes the fear. You are eclipsed in horror that doesn’t just strike at the drop of a hat, it strikes at the very thought of a hat dropping.

What’s also frequently shoved under the carpet is the physical side effects of anxiety. From when you wake up to the moment you go to bed, your body is always on edge, your mind always looking for danger in everything. Even sleep is no respite – your dreams are enough for the battle drugs to kick in, waking you up in the middle of the night as what seems like shocks of electricity force you into a fearful conscious state.

Your muscles are always tight. You sweat intensely for no reason. Your mind is wracked with tension headaches. You can develop tinnitus – the constant ringing in your ears that never goes away. You feel every heart beat and panic over the slightest increase. Your gut goes to literal shit, along with an on/off appetite. Sex is off the table. Your face aches because you are always clenching your jaw. People throw themselves into drugs, legal, prescribed, and from the street, and can add the side effects of those to the list.

And, of course, there’s the panic attack. I’ve got a whole piece to share with you on attacks soon. But for the meantime, it’s handy to know that these gruesome bastards can come from nowhere, over seemingly nothing, and can go from mild discomfort all the way up to Defcon Clusterfuck.

For some people, they’ve been dominated by this all their lives. For others, it can start innocuously enough. You’ve been stressed at work. You’ve haven’t seen your friends lately, and that chest ache has been there for what seems like years. You begin to dwell on it. You dwell too much. Before long, it’s all you can think about. Without even realising it, you’ve been walking the fear path in your brain so much that what was once a dusty path is now a motorway, injecting every thought and emotion straight to the jittery, burnt out hub that is Fear City.

Work is now a continual failure that will only end with you dumped in the gutter, alone. Your friends never reply to your texts as they despise you and only want to see your hideous face one last time when they do everyone a favour and finally get around to burning you at the stake. Not that this is your biggest concern, because your heart is definitely going to give out before they can be arsed to put you out of your misery.

You trust no one. You feel no love, no peace. The turbulent tide of terror erodes your confidence, your belief in yourself, and makes you question everything. The concept that was previously you dissolves in a tsunami of panic, destroying all that you were and blocking you from all you want to do.

Fear is now your whole life.

The warning lights are on. But they won’t be forever. Everything is temporary.

And therein lies the positive, the silver lining, the light at the end of the tunnel. If you feel the way I do, rest easy because you already have the cure.

Just go to a mirror and you’ll be looking at it.

More on that soon. But next week, self-indulgence abound as I tell my own story of anxiety. If you enjoyed this blog or find it useful, be sure to check in then, and please feel free to give it a share.

Grabbing the root

~ Superfluous G ~ Leave a comment

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.