Anxiety returns

It’s like a prickly, woollen blanket. Familiar, cosy yet it’s uncomfortable. I have had low periods of depression in the past, some documented here, but I’ve never written about the deeply unsettling anxiety which has suddenly and miraculously reappeared in recent weeks. I am terrified. I am terrified of working, I’m terrified of walking home. I can’t answer the phone. I can’t even dip into voicemails. I am in a constant state of blushed redness in the face – almost puce – and I’m terrified about being terrified. I’m exhausted. I’m also recently in love, and adore her more than anyone I’ve ever met. She doesn’t terrify me, though I’m beginning to feel terrified where it might be leading and whether she will ever be able to understand me if I tell her my deepest darkest secrets (anxiety, panic, depression).

I wake up each morning and the same thing happens. The moment I’m conscious, within 3 or 4 seconds when my brain has surfaced for sufficient air to work out what day of the week it is and where I am, my stomach flips. Now, for you reading this blog, you’ve probably only had that a dozen times in your life. Like when you went for a job interview. Or had to do a speech at school. Or your wedding. Or when you abseiled. Or when you last went on a date. A big occasion. Imagine having that every single day; imagine sweating uncontrollably from your palms, and your heart racing as fast as if you had just been jogging. Imagine sitting in an office while everyone else is calmly checking their Facebook and generally avoiding work – but no. I can’t do that. I sit there in my own self-contained atmosphere where the temperature is always too hot; where the eyes always feel they’re on me; where the pressure is so intense that I feel my heart’s about to stop.

And sometimes, like now, I wish it would.

Next time I write here, hopefully my new anti-depressants might have kicked in. For now, I am filled with and fuelled by adrenaline – a drug so powerful that by the end of a normal office day, I am too exhausted to keep my eyes open and my muscles ache with the tension of flight-or-fight readiness that my brain has prepared them for.

There is only one life, and at the moment it is simply too hard, too exhausting, too painful.  I cannot wait for it to end and I don’t know when it will, or how I will be able to find a solution to it all – it feels too medical, though I know it’s all in my head. I feel in prison, my own handmade little prison – the bars constricting my body and crushing my hopes and dreams.

I just wish I could be normal, relaxed and happy – and how laughably pathetic it is that me, a middle-class westerner, should be so self-loathing and introspective while the majority of mankind still don’t have a safe habitat or enough water to sustain themselves. Sometimes I wonder whether we, in the west, have progressed beyond our capabilities; whether our primal monkey habits, so ingrained inside our psyche, will ever be truly dampened or satisfied. Right now, with me being so pent up, I could fight my own war with my two bare hands and come out smelling of roses.

I hope nobody ever suffers from what I do. It is a sickness too black to describe even to the one you love.