Tag Archives: anxiety

Phases: Waxing Crescent

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Penny: You were fine. Really. Sounded extra confident. Like a boss.

Sam: I don’t think Tom bought it.

Penny: Tom? Are you kidding, Barbs? Tom LOVES you. Like actually loves you.

Sam: He does not, you maniac.

Penny: His aura changes when you speak. Vibrates.

Sam: His aura vibrates?

Penny: Trust me. I am attuned.

Sam: He is too old. Must be nearly 50.

Penny: There is nobody your age in this workshop. What did we say about being choosy?

Sam: “We” didn’t say anything. I said I wasn’t interested right now and, very specifically, that I wasn’t interested in anybody in this office.

Penny: Yes but we said you shouldn’t be choosy. Even with TDH. And now is the perfect time. The imminent waxing crescent. New beginnings. Possibilities.

Sam: Are you high right now, Pen? Please tell me you are either stoned or drunk or gave up your caffeine sabbatical and are struggling to deal with a double shot macchiato.

Penny: Clean and serene, Barbs. Clean and serene. The moon is my only mistress. Okay. Maybe the moon and Matthew McConaughey.

Sam: Alright, alright, alright. How is he your mistress?

Penny: Don’t be so gender normative. Me and Matthew would be mixing it all up.

Sam: Enough now. Do you know what’s going on?

Penny: Still reviewing the risk register. Ten more minutes and then I will buy you that coffee.

Sam toggled alt and tab on her keyboard, watched her Teams chat with Penny be replaced with a copy of the Powerpoint they were supposed to be following in the meeting. She glanced up at the larger TV screen in the meeting room where one of Tom’s auditors, she hadn’t clocked his name, had plugged his laptop in and was walking them through the content. She realised she was about three slides behind. Nobody seemed to have noticed, lost in a conversation about whether to extend the scope of the audit to include expenses. As she picked up the thread it largely served to remind her why she had zoned out and looked for the distraction with Penny.

The core group running the meeting were Tom, Head of Financial Controls, Richard, some guy from another part of Finance, and Henry, their external auditor from Deloitte. Early on in the process Penny had repeatedly tried to call Henry, Harry, just so that she could refer to them collectively as Tom, Dick, and Harry, but he had politely – and in the end firmly – insisted that his name was never intended to be anything other than Henry. It hadn’t stopped her consistently referring to them as TDH on every Teams exchange with Sam since. Exchanges like “WTF TDH” and “IDK TDH” had become far more common than “LOL TDH” or “FTW TDH” as the project had steadily unearthed more and more process anomalies that seemed to vex the auditors. Status ratings moved like traffic lights stuck permanently in reverse: green to amber to red.

“I’m still not comfortable that we close out the earlier points about salary sacrifice controls,” said Richard. “I don’t think flagging it as a requiring a minor mitigation is sufficient.”

“We covered this…” started Penny.

“It’s not your area,” said Richard. “Sam? I’m surprised you were so willing to shut this down.”

Sam felt her heart rate quicken. Unseen she curled her toes within her shoes, as if she could hook them into the ground beneath her seat. One of her fingers began to lightly tap on the surface of her laptop, just next to the trackpad. She watched it, tried to count each fourth tap, tried to focus on her breathing but all it served to do was make her more aware of the syncopation between the tapping, her heartbeat, and her now less steady inhalation and exhalation.

“We’ve logged it to follow up,” she said, forcing herself to look directly at him, maintaining eye contact until he looked back down at his screen. “Let’s keep moving, please, or we won’t cover everyone else’s items.”

“I just think…,”

“It’s done,” she snapped. Silence fell in the room. Sam could see Penny rapidly tapping out something on her keyboard and in her peripheral vision she registered a new notification in her Teams. She held Richard’s surprised gaze. More quietly now: “It’s done.”

“Let’s take that break,” said Tom. “Twenty minutes, grab a coffee, and then we can work through the rest of the agenda.”

Richard looked like he was about to interject again but Tom looked across at him and gave the slightest shake of his head, barely perceptible to anyone else. Penny clocked it. She had been holding an exaggerated focus on the others to disguise that her fingers were still flying over her keys, sending a series of concerned, supportive messages to Sam. (Penny: Hang in there Barbs. He’s literally a dick called Dick. Tom just shut him down, I told you he liked you.) Their recipient remained very still save for her persistently tapping finger which only ceased once the three men had left the room.

Sam excused herself as Penny began talking – exclamations broadly in keeping with her Teams message but with even less censorship – and left the room, headed back down a floor away from the Finance neighbourhood (when the offices had been refurbed Facilities had insisted on calling the various open plan zones where functions sat, neighbourhoods – Penny had spent the first week coming in wearing sunglasses and insisting that the entire second floor was her ‘hood). She found a vacant toilet, locked the door behind herself and engaged the hand dryer. She had expected to burst into tears and she was using the noise from the dryer purely as cover but something in its dissonant din seemed to calm her and so she stood, turning her hands over and over beneath the jet of air. She considered whether to run through her exercises to steady herself further but the prospect of naming five things she could see, five things she could hear, and five things she could smell, was too depressing. She could see herself in the mirror, a sink in front of her, a toilet behind her, a discarded sanitary towel wrapper that had fallen out of the bin, and a checklist on the door showing the two hourly intervals at which the room had been cleaned which confirmed it had been done twenty minutes ago. The sound of the dryer, as she intended, blotted everything else out and she refused to remove the focus of her nostrils from the lavender hand wash in a dispenser by the taps; it was slightly undercut by a too sharp, citrus disinfectant. Her breathing slowed.

Penny was waiting for her in the coffee shop, they still had ten minutes before the meeting was due to resume. She had bought her a drink – “you’re not back on oat, are you, because if you are then, sorry, but I just fucked up” – and was waiting with it in a corner. She put her phone down and smiled as Sam walked over, explained about the drink. Sam shook her head and sat down.

“I could set the fire alarm off?” said Penny. Sam looked up at her. “To crash the meeting. I reckon it’d waste another half an hour easy and then we just claim we’ve got something else that clashes.”

“It’s fine,” said Sam. “Really, it’s fine. I don’t know why it’s all getting so…”

“Tense?”

“I was going to go with panicky or anxious or worrying but tense is okay.” She sipped her coffee. “As long as I can spend a solid twenty to thirty minutes every day hiding in a toilet and recomposing myself then everything will be fine.”

“It’s just an audit,” said Penny. “I don’t understand why you’re taking it so personally. A bunch of grey men with grey lives checking up on the cool kids.”

“I run a tech stack that includes payroll, expenses, the order management system for this building’s canteen, and the software that runs office security. You work in HR. In payroll. If they’re checking up on the cool kids then they’re checking in the wrong place.”

“I still think office security sounds quite cool. You can see all the CCTV footage, right?”

“One last time, Pen. Yes, I can but, no, I don’t. And very definitely, no, you can’t.” Penny started to open her mouth. “Not even to watch yourself walking around the office to see who looks up from their desk as you go by.”

“Such an obvious use case,” sighed Penny. “You should absolutely do that for yourself. I suspect you’d be shocked at the attention you get.”

“Attention is not what I’m after right now. Not from anybody in this office. Not Tom before you start up with that again. I want to be invisible to everyone, maybe even to myself.”

“It’s still the new moon, Barbs, which is lucky for you as that’s when it’s invisible but it won’t stay like that for long.”

“Waxing crescent. You told me, several times. More like waxing lyrical. A sliver of it comes back into view. I understand the clunky analogy, Pen. Unlike you, though, I don’t believe my fate is tied up by the natural progression of celestial objects through space. Shit happens, or happened, and I need to deal with them. Some sleep, some control back over my own brain, and it’ll all be fine.”

“You’re being too rational about it all,” said Penny. “It’s a lot, what happened. Ben leaving. The tax stuff. That new arsehole starting above you.”

“The week that FOMS started duplicating orders and they got six hundred chicken breasts, two hundred tomatoes, and so much lettuce they gave everyone one to take home and still couldn’t fit it all in the fridges,” added Sam.

“Chicken salad week? Everyone loved that week. Or I did anyway, lost half a kilo. All I’m saying is that you’ve got a lot going on and maybe need to give yourself a break, not try to fix it all up here.” Penny tapped the side of her head to illustrate. “Give in to something you don’t understand. Even one of those celestial objects you’re so quick to dismiss.”

“Nine more days and it’s done, I just need to keep it together until then.”

“I’m going to the States then,” said Penny. “When it’s all done. I’m doing that California trip. Come with.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “The one where you’re going moon gazing with a bunch of hippies and men in cargo shorts with telescopes and their own fold away canvas chairs?”

“It does involve some time in Yosemite and the desert looking up at the ineffable reaches of space, yes.”

“Is that what the brochure says?”

“I need more time to sell it to you,” said Penny. “Me, you, hire car, the great highways of North America. Nature. Probably some ill advised cut off denim shorts. Come on, it’ll be great.”

“It sounds like Thelma and Louise…”

“Yeah. I’ll even let you have Brad Pitt when we meet him.”

“You know how that movie ends?”

“We write our own ending, Barbs. I promise you I won’t pitch us off the Grand Canyon. Even if they sack us for fucking up everyone’s expenses last year and that minor salmonella outbreak from chicken that had gone past its sell by date.”

“That was not my fault!” laughed Sam. “The system ordered it, sure, but the kitchen should’ve dealt with it after that.”

“Think about it,” said Penny.

“Later. I will. Come on, we’ve got to get back to TDH. They’ll think I’m stalling on ‘appropriate mitigations’ again.”

Penny looked at her. “We could do that. Or…” She reached her hand up behind her shoulder, ran her hand across the front of the fire alarm panel. “How much force do you need to break the glass in these anyway?”

Sam started to stand, reaching for Penny’s arm. She knocked her coffee over and jumped back from the pooling brown liquid spreading across the table, watched it begin to spill over the side and run like a waterfall to the floor. Penny put a finger to her lips, closed her eyes, and pressed hard against the glass. As the alarm began to echo around the building Penny stood, took Sam by the arm, and steadily walked them both towards the exit.

“Tell me you can delete the CCTV?”

Phases: New Moon

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Sam woke, heart pounding, at exactly 3am. She didn’t set an alarm anymore, the electronic clock by her bed replaced lately by the nightly rise of panic inside herself, always culminating in the violent shock of jolting from sleep, gulping air, thoughts recirculating in her mind like contaminate trapped in a broken air conditioning unit. There was half a mug of cold peppermint tea on her bedside table which she sipped, willing it to calm her better than it evidently had a few hours ago when it had still been warm. A specific thought chased itself. If the project deadline was in ten days then you still have to run all the revised figures, still have to get them signed off, still have to draft the paper that nobody will read, still have to attend the daily stand up, still have to fit it in around year end. You are behind and ten days isn’t enough. And you wasted yesterday when eleven days wasn’t enough. The thought looped back for a repeat visit. Closing her eyes just gave it momentum. She opened them and started her exercises, named five things she could see. Clock. Mug. Mirror. Dressing gown slung over a wardrobe door. Empty space where you used to lie next to me. Then name them with description. Really see them. Grey cube with dull black numbers radiating from its front reading 3.04. White mug with a capital L printed on one of its sides, faded now but once a bold red. The mirror is propped up on a dressing table opposite the bed, silver framed, flaking at one corner, a smudge on the glass. My dressing gown is a pale blue, three quarters length, pocket bulging with tissues. The empty space is just that: empty. The last part of the exercise now. Her heart rate was slowing. Don’t just see them. Remind yourself about them, about the memories attached to the objects. Connect them. I bought the clock a few weeks ago after resolving to keep my phone out of reach in the bedroom, part of a new set of rituals to sleep. It had been cheap and its alarm wasn’t particularly cheerful: a brash single electronic note that seemed to operate at the same abrasive volume irrespective of how it was set. The only upside of waking at 3 was that I never heard it. The mug had been part of a set we’d bought together. Four in total that spelled out L O V E or, as you never tired of finding funny, V O L E. The other three were all broken, two by accident, the O on purpose after you left. I smashed it one night after trying to make a coffee to sober up a little, in the solo drinking phase that kicked in for a few weeks. It had fallen apart easily. I appreciated the metaphor. I’d kept the L. but I don’t know why. The mirror is smudged from yesterday’s hairspray. Another morning rushing to be ready after another disturbed night. I rubbed it with a make up remover pad but not before staring through it at my now distorted, disguised face, at my indistinct fuzzy edges. The pad just smeared the residue across the glass. Blue is not your colour was one of the things you used to say. I’m not sure why I didn’t tell you to fuck off but I didn’t. I used to avoid it and dressed in polite pastels and muted beige. Black. Grey. The dressing gown was the first piece of clothing I bought afterwards. In truth I didn’t really even like it but it was the first blue one that I saw. And there’s too many memories about the empty space. Too much connection. She closed her eyes, felt her breathing settle.

She knew, despite the reprieve from her anxiety, that she wouldn’t sleep again now. The panic was gone but replaced with a numbing sense of loss that she felt like a weight, pinning her to the bed. If she didn’t rise now then she feared she might not muster the energy to rise again. The thoughts about work were still there but in the background now, submerged under the memories of him, of them, and the project and the deadline felt distant now, remote, rather than urgent and real. Somewhere in her mind she registered that this was the pattern from last night, the night before, the night before that, and that her ten remaining days would soon be nine, but she felt too exhausted to do anything other than file that information for later. She was fairly sure it’d surface at 3am the following night. She resolved, at least, to put some different objects within sight of the bed so that she could change up her exercise.

She lifted the duvet. It was cool in the room and she lay for a moment, feeling the slight chill on her bare arms, letting it take her attention. Feet on the wooden floor now, reassurance in its solidity, pressing her weight through her toes. Grounding was another one of the exercises. She stood and pulled back one of the curtains, the night sky had become part of her new routine but tonight it had little to show. The moon was absent and other than Venus she couldn’t pick anything out; she had an app on her phone to track constellations but if she retrieved it then she wouldn’t be able to resist checking her email, checking her Teams messages, doom scrolling the news, and watching the social algorithms unwittingly mock her existence: five tips for banishing anxiety, why men leave, blue dresses for this Spring, why you procrastinate, living your best life alone, defence against panic attacks, sleep like a baby. The app could wait.

Sam ran through the list of things her counsellor had suggested for switching back off, finding sleep again. Light yoga. She could see her mat buried underneath a pile of clothes and the idea of picking through that many hastily bought blue sets of matching underwear held no appeal. Deep breathing. This felt more achievable but she knew you couldn’t maintain focus on ‘the golden thread’ or whatever she was supposed to call it, not whilst the work thought was still lapping the inside of her brain. It was on the far side of her mental track right now but only whilst she kept distracted. Breathing would give it time to return. Listen to calming story on mindfulness app. This never worked. For starters there was still the problem of resisting the pull of every other dopamine driven distraction on her phone to consciously pick the one that was supposed to switch all that off. And the stories were shit. There was one about a train ride through the Canadian Rockies, slowly intoned by a very deep voiced man, in which literally nothing happened. She got that there was supposed to be something soporific in his tone, in the repetition, in the idea of the movement on rails, forwards but a barely perceptible rocking, but she would get bored and invent events on the train. A discarded briefcase carrying twenty grams of cocaine and a loaded gun. The driver suffering a heart attack as they sped through a red signal. A woman waking up, confused, believing that she is in hell and all the other passengers were demons. Maybe that last one was too close to home. None of it worked. None of the active attempts at relaxation: moving, breathing, listening. She pulled her dressing gown from the back of the wardrobe and went downstairs.

She made a coffee and sat in her conservatory under a blanket she’d left there as a practical acknowledgement that she was routinely waking up before the heating came on each morning. Resetting the thermostat clock seemed like admitting defeat entirely. She checked her phone, its pale LED the only light in the room. There were a string of messages from Penny who texted in a very particular format, one sentence at a time or sometimes just a handful of words. Missed you today. Don’t WFH tomorrow. I swear. Barbs. I can not do the risk workshop without you. Promise. Me. Come in. Sam smiled at “Barbs”, she thought Penny would have let go of that by now but it seemed to have stuck, a hangover from the time they’d driven to Bristol for the department’s annual community day and she’d surprised both of them with a word perfect run through of No More Tears (Enough Is Enough). Mainly the Streisand parts. Hence, Barbs. It had been a few months after he left which may have explained the force of her delivery and also the floods of tears at the end. Penny tried to keep skipping to something that might cheer her up but all Barbra was channeling on that playlist was heartbreak: Memory, You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, The Way We Were. Eventually she hit Don’t Rain On My Parade and finally succeeded in making Sam laugh by singing it in the broadest Brooklyn accent she could muster and repeatedly asking her if she wanted to stop for “cwoffee” at the next services.

Scanning back across the staccato messages she settled on ‘risk workshop’ and she felt the tempo of her heartbeat rise slightly. Closing her eyes she could visualise the to-do list in her OneNote, the slightly different one in her notebook, the version she’d painstakingly put into Planner (the one that auto populated her calendar with tasks which she’d had to turn off as it served up daily, angry notifications of shame at her unfulfilled aspirations), and the shortened, priority list she had condensed to a post-it. That last one had been stuck to the bottom of her monitor but kept falling off. She wondered if it would be acceptable to list the following risks as matters of critical concern in the workshop: hitting 38 alone, drinking brandy midweek as she had promised herself she wouldn’t drink wine every night, having a panic attack in the car park at work if someone had taken her usual place, crying to Knowing Me, Knowing You by Abba when it came on in Tesco’s, having an old man take her elbow and assure her that it would be okay, that a lovely young lady like her shouldn’t cry, and that he was sure any man would be lucky to have her, in Tesco’s shortly after crying to Abba. The main risk she needed to flag was the risk of having done none of the preparation for the meeting, completed none of her actions, and her failure to respond to any of the increasingly urgent emails from audit requesting immediate acknowledgement and evidence of remedial actions. The time was now 4am. Maybe two solid hours on Chat-GPT would sort it all out. Give her enough, at least, to busk it through another day.

She let the phone screen dim and stared out of the glass doors overlooking her garden. When the moon was fuller she would sometimes find calm in watching tree branches turn a shadow play across its surface. Or she would try to imagine being up there, listening to her own breathing inside a space helmet, staring back down at the blue globe orbiting the sun. Blue was not her colour. Maybe this was not her home. It was dark tonight though. No moon.

She prodded the phone back to life. Texted Penny back. I’ll be in. As it’s you. Buy me a cwoffee.

All My Friends: Jason

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I was pretty drunk but that was not unusual so I had no problem catching Lizzie’s arm, steadying her as she stumbled over her dance steps. It was like I’d re-calibrated my own sense of sobriety over the past couple of years; no drink at all left the world too sharp, too acute and I needed a few units to take the edge off it. Otherwise there was just too much of everything. I suppose I was aware that it was taking a little bit more, steadily month by month, to blunt the razor. I was aware but I had no interest in stopping.

It had been an effort to come. Lizzie was hard to say no to, just like old times. Somehow she’d worn me down, stalking me on social, filling my mobile with texts, piling up mail in my in box. I wasn’t really in touch with the others and so perhaps curiosity had gotten the better of me. They’d all sent messages after 7/7 but Lizzie was the only one that I’d seen in person, insisting on taking me out to various pubs in Highgate, plying me with gin until I’d loosen up enough to talk about it all. Most of those nights ended in tears – my tears – and her arms around me, whispering that I needed to let it out. She meant well but I always felt like her therapy 101 approach to my psychological welfare was akin to her approach to parties when we’d all known each other as students: she was brilliant at making a mess but lousy at clearing up afterwards.

In the end it’d been the promise of some peace in the country that had convinced me. I think Lizzie had sent everyone an invite with a screen grab from Withnail & I on it underscored with a stolen line from the film: “what we need is fresh air, harmony, stuff like that”. Maybe she didn’t realise quite the extent to which I’d been drifting into the arena of the unwell, to steal another line, but seeing Richard E Grant’s disheveled indignance stirred something in me; one washed up, booze soaked loser calling to another. London wasn’t good for me anymore, I knew that. I was double dosing on beta blockers and citalopram just to function, slooshing the pills down with a glass of red on a good day and a bottle on a bad one. I’d started travelling in the rear of tube trains because I figured if someone was going to blow themselves up they’d be near the front, cause more damage as the momentum of the trailing carriages concertinaed into each other. I’d started applying rational assumptions to irrational acts carried out by lunatics. What did that make me?

If you’d have asked me before that day, before the smoke, before picking my way through darkness, nostrils filled with the scent of charred flesh, mouth stung with the iron tang of blood, before the starter-gun blast that had left my ears permanently tuned to a constant background of static, before hearing the confused, frightened cries for help, if you’d asked me just before then I’d have said I missed them all. Lizzie and Jo and Neil and Clare and Richard and Jon and Gina. There had been a time when that was our little universe, each of us orbiting the others. Afterwards a distance opened up. I guess the explosion pushed me out, gave me enough velocity that I just flew off into the darkest reaches of space. How do you break orbit? What would I know? Neil could probably explain it but none of us ever really had the patience for listening to him explain his degree except Jon. And even Jon seemed to give up on him after a while. Everything changed that day. I changed that day and they became, pretty much in an instant, strangers to me.

Nothing in the weekend had caused me to change my view. I saw all of the old routines play out but felt detached from all of them. I used to be a part of it but now I just felt like I was watching a bad remake of The Big Chill or, worse, Peter’s Friends. Jesus, let it be me that’s saved up for the end of the film as the big reveal: I’ll be the one with the incurable disease or the one that died or the one that’s about to be murdered. So I did what I always did lately and I drank. It made the movie more bearable. It slowed things down enough, dialed down my twitchy anxiety enough, to catch Lizzie’s arm as she faltered. I watched her dancing, the others calling her name in time to the song, and watched her unhook her bra, drop it to the floor. Everyone cheered. Same old Lizzie. It reminded me of something we used to do and I thought this was her last attempt to bring me back, to tractor-beam me back into their constellation.

I dropped my jeans, swung my hips in an exaggerated fashion. Lizzie mock spanked me just like all those nights a lifetime ago, all those nights before, and the others laughed and called out encouragement. I fixed a smile on my face and tried to tune in to the joy, to the nostalgia, concentrating on gyrating my hips, forcing as much comedy as I could from the simple act of removing my trousers, but it was drowned out in my head by screams and fire.

Stage fright

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He stood with his arm on the mic stand, elbow jutting out, as if it might prop him up like a crutch. He clutched the microphone in his other hand, head bowed to meet it. Hunched and bunched. Words swam in his mind but not the ones he’d sat up, late nights and early mornings, scribbling, scrawling in endless notebooks. Rhymes taunted him. Hunched and bunched. Clutch and crutch. He couldn’t see them out there in the darkness but he could hear patience running thin, the scrape of chair legs, glasses on tables, voices that began in whispers growing in volume. He stood framed and still in the spotlight. Hiding in plain sight. Light and sight. Clutch and crutch. Hunched and bunched. Words and rhymes, just not the right ones.

Come on, man. Give up the stage, buddy, let someone else speak. We wanna hear some verse.

The restlessness in the room has a shape now, an edge. It’s been given voice and all he can hear is chatter and disappointment and a room full of wasted Friday nights. There’s a hand on his arm and the compere is leaning into his ear, urging him to speak or sit down. He’s seen this before and there’s a note of understanding but the grip on his arm is getting tighter and he can feel a distinct tug away from the microphone. Some people just can’t do it up here. It’s all in their head and all on the page but not here, not here where there’s nowhere to hide.

He closes his eyes. Whatever he wrote in all those dripping minutes and sweeping hours has gone. Now or never. He speaks.

 

Life writes faster than I can write:

 

If I really – really – committed and held myself to the words,

A thousand words, every day,

Two thousand, three thousand, four,

I’d be too slow and too far behind the curve, the swerve.

Even if I lost some of my reflexive reserve I just don’t have that kind of verve

And maybe I don’t have the nerve.

 

Maybe I’m not ready to bleed.

This ain’t no magic trick, there’s nothing up my sleeve,

No facade or screen or Wizard of Oz behind the scenes and

No filter between you and me: you ready to hear my dreams?

My screams?

My brain and guts and heart and all the viscera in between?

 

‘Cos you might have met me tonight, or any night, any day

And all that stuff we learn to protect ourselves with would have been in the way,

All those masks, those crutches that keep me from your clutches, that suit of armour I lug around,

Each step heavier than the last as it drags me down.

Hunched and bunched and scrunched and out to lunched.

Gut punched.

And all the stuff would have been in the way and would have done its job.

Its fobbing off job: it would have said I’m okay.

 

But I’m not okay.

Not tonight, or any night, any day.

I learned too much of that stuff to protect myself with and it gets in the way.

I got to learn to bleed.

I got to learn to write faster than life.

 

‘Cos lately life’s been writing faster than I can write and faster than I can stand to live.

 

Later, when they buy him a drink, they tell him there was applause. Later, when he puts that armour back on, it feels a little different. A little lighter.

Words nobody reads

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We are the words nobody reads,

The wounds you don’t notice because they don’t bleed.

We are the sentences you ignore, paragraphs you discard,

We are the hidden, the invisible, the scarred.

 

We are the words nobody reads,

Scratched and scribbled on pages, the messages you don’t heed.

We are the letters you never opened, emails you ignore,

We are the broken and damaged in search of a cure.

 

We are the words nobody reads,

The maddening march of madness our self chatter feeds.

We are the fractured fragments, the anxious and edgy lines,

We are the imperfect, something remiss between execution and design.

 

We carry our words unwritten and unread

But they shout to us within self-sabotaging minds: louder than peace.

On paper, untrapped, they lie benign and quiet,

Released.

You read.

The Faceless

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Don’t fall behind. Don’t stop.

The snow is everywhere, in piles around our feet, stinging our faces in the wind, and seeping through clothes, through skin, through bone. The cold is the only thing we are certain of now, infinite in time and place; we have no memory of not being cold and no sense that there is anywhere it does not reach. Walking in that snow, in that impenetrable cold, is the hardest thing any of us have ever done. Don’t fall behind. Don’t stop.

The rules are simple. Walk and live. Fall behind and die. They pursue. So we don’t stop. Even if our living has become mechanical, functional – left foot, right foot, left foot – it is all we have and so it is all we do. We are not sure if we still feel, soaked in frost and numb to our core, but we maintain the trudge through some unconscious autonomic impulse. The impulse to live. Don’t fall behind. Don’t stop.

The longer we walk the thicker the snow drifts and the more numb we become, the fire in our heart that kept the chill at bay dying to embers. Our steps slow until movement is almost imperceptible; the weight of snow on our boots too heavy to lift. It would be easier to stop, to lay back in the freezing embrace of the white blankets that surround us, close our eyes, and be swallowed. But there is some heat yet in the ashes. Some flicker that we once remembered as hope. Don’t fall behind. Don’t stop.

We are lost now. Our eyes blinking against driving, whirling flurries of sleet and powder, tears long frozen clinging to our cheeks. There is nothing to see beyond white oblivion: we don’t know where we are. We don’t know how we got here or how we might reach somewhere that’s not here, just that we must put one foot down in front of the other and walk. We walk not to find our way out: we walk because to stop signals defeat. They pursue. Don’t fall behind. Don’t stop.

We walk to escape. We don’t stop because they are relentless. The faceless stalk us.

The faceless do not weep for they lack eyes with which to cry. The faceless do not speak for they lack mouths with which to talk. The faceless do not hear for they lack ears with which to listen.

No tears. No voice. No sound. But they know. They know, they mourn, and they pursue. And their mourning will only know peace through their vengeance on us. Us that see and shed tears. Us that shout and laugh. Us that hear so much. So much and yet not enough.

The faceless tread soft, as silent in their coming as the over night frost, as the snow ‘neath our feet. We do not hear them; as they do not hear us. But they do not rely on such things. They know. They mourn. They pursue. And their vengeance will be without mercy.

……

This is the eleventh story in my series of 42 shorts that I’m writing to raise money and awareness for Mind, the mental health charity. This one is a slightly abstract attempt to express how depression feels to me. Please share it if you liked it (or even if you didn’t…). If you’re interested in donating to a great cause then please visit my fundraising page. https://www.justgiving.com/42shorts/

Are you alright there ?

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“Are you alright there ?” asks the girl with the green hair behind the till.

I set down the books I’m buying on the counter: “Overcoming Anxiety”, “Mindfulness: Finding Peace In A Frantic World”, and “Man’s Search For Meaning”. Oh, and Robin Hobb’s “Ship Of Magic”. Three parts self help, one part pure escapism.

Her question isn’t literal. I know that. It is a very British way of wrapping up “hello” and “can I take some form of payment for those books you’re holding ?”. It doesn’t need a response. Certainly not an honest response; that would be a clear violation of social etiquette. You don’t really tell someone whether you’re alright. Particularly someone  you’ve never met.

But the books… It’s so obvious. It seems too absurd to be asked that question, lay down those books, and not say anything. And she has green hair. I had already decided, in a distracted moment in the queue, that nobody who had green hair could be a bad person.

“Evidently not…” I offer apologetically. “As you can see by my choice of books”.

It hangs there uncomfortably between us. As soon as I say it I feel awful. She clearly now feels desperately awkward. There had been nothing in the Waterstone’s customer service training that covered this terrain. Nothing, frankly, in much of our usual social intercourse amongst strangers that covered it. I was in clear violation of all of the unspoken rules and I knew it and regretted it.

“Well I hope the books help…” she starts. A pause. “I suffer a little with anxiety too so I know what it’s like…”

She leaves it hanging there. What had started as a straightforward transaction – small pieces of paper handed over for larger, bound ones – had turned into a mental health confessional. A tiny, strange connection.

“Books help most things, don’t they ?” I offer back.

“Yeah” she agrees. “And it’s good you’ve got the Robin Hobb. Bit of self help and then a big story to get lost in”. We are silent for a moment as she scans the books and I pay. “Hope they help” she says again, putting the books into a bag, folding my receipt, and handing them both back to me.

“Thanks” I say. Not just for the books but for forgiving my intrusion, for acknowledging my admission, for showing some empathy, some vulnerability, and for liking Robin Hobbs. I didn’t say those bits. My ingrained social etiquette is back in control.

I hope she knew that was what I meant anyway. At the very least I hope I didn’t mess up her day. Our briefest moment of recognition was pretty much the highlight of mine.

It’s not going to stop ’til you wise up

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38. Wise Up – Aimee Mann

If there was ever a movie version of this blog – just suspend belief for a moment – then it’s becoming apparent that the director would need to change the ending. There are five records left to cover, including this one, and in the movie you might reasonably expect those final musical musings to build to some sort of rousing conclusion. A happy ending.

However – *spoilers* – we are probably not headed for a neat and tidy finale in which our hero (again, suspend some of that belief for me) unravels the question to the life, the universe, and everything, unpicks whether the answer really is Deep Thought’s 42, and achieves a deep and abiding sense of contentment. It’s going to be more like the end of Empire Strikes Back than Return Of The Jedi, put it that way.

All of which is a slightly convoluted way of ‘fessing up that the road back from anxiety and depression – assuming optimistically that there is a “back” – seems to be a difficult one. In the neat and tidy version of this blog I returned to work after my sabbatical with a renewed and refreshed perspective on how I wanted to live and floated through productive days in a state of Zen like calm. In the real version I’m still artificially moderating my adrenaline levels with pills, still struck with irrational panic in seemingly innocuous scenarios, and still sometimes hating myself for what has happened to me. Or what I seem to be doing to myself, albeit subconsciously. I’m not even really sure which it is. I guess it’s what I’m doing to myself.

I’ve never really been very good at expressing how I feel. Turns out I may not even be very good at feeling how I feel. I seem to have something of an aversion to fully experiencing how I’m feeling and being okay with it, in all its glorious, uncontrollable, maddening cadences. Just for clarity, I’m not a psychopath, I haven’t lost the capacity to feel, it’s just that I seem to have stopped allowing myself full range of expression without even realizing it. It’s almost as if I have become distrustful of giving free reign to experiencing emotion and have tried to lock it away, either to project some notion of strength or to protect against something painful. It is a very difficult thing for me to admit to vulnerability. I realise that sentence looks somewhat incongruous written on a publically viewable blog, somewhat contradictory, but there’s a distance here – between me writing and someone reading, even if it’s someone that knows me – that feels okay in a way that telling someone the same wouldn’t. Put another way, possibly more simply, it is not too difficult to write here that I cried on my way home from work this week because I felt so defeated by my illness (if that’s what it is – I guess that’s what it is) but I would almost certainly never let you see those tears.

For a long time I have tried to keep a lid on it. Keep it under control. Inevitably it’s all still there, bubbling away under the surface – constant maintenance of which requires no little effort (the Manic’s “No Surface, All Feeling” was on my long list of songs for this blog). That’s not to say that I think that everything would be okay if I magically transformed into a creature driven entirely by its emotional impulses, that would seem to me to just be a different kind of hysterical mess. There’s a balance somewhere and I haven’t found it, don’t seem to know quite how to find it, and the consequence of that is that stuff (eat your heart out Jung) builds up inside me, isn’t given expression, and ends up popping out in other ways: lately in anxiety, previously in depression. In that context anxiety really is a fucker (eat your heart out Freud) as it becomes like a loop – repressed emotion feeding an anxiety response which in turn provokes a repression of emotion for fear of an anxiety response. Rinse and repeat.

Even this post is telling about my essential modus operandi. It’s a pretty rational, balanced assessment of something that is happening to me – or something that currently is me – rather than a splurge of feeling. It’s fairly dispassionate and detached. And that might well be part of my issue. The point of it, I guess, is a recognition and acknowledgement of that fact. The process of actually giving up the barriers I duck behind emotionally may take rather longer.

All of which 6th form psychology brings us to Aimee Mann. I’ve alluded to the fact before that there were a number of artists whose place on the list of my 42 records was never in question and she was absolutely one of them. I first heard her properly via the film “Magnolia” (and this song is part of the soundtrack) and the album she released around the same time, “Bachelor No. 2”. She is consistently smart, sharp, wise, funny, melancholic, warm, and melodic. There are very few wry observers of the human condition via the medium of three minute pop songs that I admire more.

“Wise Up” is a pretty simple song – a beautiful song but pretty simple. In the context of “Magnolia” it works to tie together the stories of the various lost characters in the film, asking each of them to recognise that things won’t improve for them unless they acknowledge some things about themselves and change. It’s about as straightforward as it gets in terms of wrapping a record in to my own personal narrative. The last line of the song might be heard as ambiguous – it’s not going to stop so just… give up – but I have always heard that line as “giving up” modes of behaviour or habits that are damaging rather than the more blunt sense of just giving up entirely. It’s a hopeful giving up rather than a fatal one.

So I suspect, in four record’s time, that not all of this will be resolved; there will be room for a sequel (although I’m not committing to writing about another 42 records). It may even turn into a saga – perhaps I could franchise it and sell tee shirts or something (“keep calm and take propranolol hydrochloride” or something equally snappy). I will try at the very least to ensure it remains a story of wising up and giving up.

Lightly tapping a high pitched drum

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33. Less Than You Think – Wilco

About three years ago, over the course of a weekend, I started experiencing the sensation of fullness in my ears, as if I was sat on a plane endlessly circling whilst it waited for clearance to land at exactly the altitude where pressure builds in the ear drum but you can’t release it. When that sensation abated I was left with a faint fuzzy white noise in my left ear, mostly noticeable at night when everything was still and quiet. It was the start of tinnitus and it has never gone away since. I’ve kind of given up thinking now that it ever will.

My tinnitus almost certainly arose as a symptom of dysfunction in my jaw joint (if you find the place that the two parts of your jaw join you may be surprised just how close to the ear it is). To cut a long story short I was a serial teeth grinder and clencher which, over a sustained period, had effectively forced my jaw to try and compensate for a loss of height in my teeth by sliding into a new position. Finding this out was a mixed blessing I guess – my ears themselves are fine, this wasn’t tinnitus induced by loud noise (as per the infamous Pete Townshend example here) – but the underlying problem turned out to involve quite a lot of pain.

Or maybe I should put that another way. Quite a lot of low level but continuous pain. Nagging discomfort in my face, down my neck, sometimes into my shoulder, sometimes up to my eye socket. Nothing that stops me in my tracks but enough to distract, to act almost as a permanent stop on properly relaxing, or properly being present in any given moment. It kind of takes over, or at least it did for a while. Even writing it now I feel kind of whiney, there’s a part of me that keeps saying “ah just get on with it, there’s plenty worse off than you” and whilst there’s a deal of truth in that it’s undeniable that living with constant pain profoundly affected me.

It’s not coincidence that shortly after this all started that I suffered my worst period of depression. Not the twitchy, slightly hyper anxiety of recent months but just a numb withdrawal from the world, a dislocation from everything because it had become too overwhelming. Neither are much fun to be honest but if you made me choose I’d probably settle for the anxiety over the depression; an over stimulated fight or flight response at least means you still have some fight. I went through a period with no fight whatsoever: I think I’d just had enough.

Around the time that the tinnitus started I listened to a lot of Wilco’s album “A Ghost Is Born”. I particularly remember listening to it on the way to and from my frequent visits to a specialist dentist near Marylebone who helped (for now at least) realign my jaw (the problem being temporomandibular joint disorder, or TMJ for short). I’m a long time fan of Wilco, not quite from the “A.M.” days but I had second album “Being There” shortly after it came out, but had struggled a bit to find a way in to the somewhat more oblique “Ghost Is Born”. There’s melody and songs but there’s dissonance and noise too. It’s not the Wilco record you’d take home to meet your parents unless your parents were Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon.

At the time I don’t think I knew a huge amount about Jeff Tweedy, Wilco frontman and song writer, and certainly didn’t know the circumstances surrounding the recording of “Ghost…”. However, listening to it repeatedly it seemed fairly obvious to me then – and definitely now – that the record had pain as a theme running pretty centrally through it. Not even, funnily enough, necessarily in its lyrical preoccupations but it’s just sonically jarring: there’s almost a constant thread of background distortion and regular slashes of noise. In particular, towards the end of the record, is “Less Than You Think” which starts out as a sombre, quiet thing, Tweedy mumbling about “your mind’s a machine, deadly and dull” before shortly collapsing into a twelve minute drone; a background hum punctuated with pulses and whistles and clicks.

It’s not a comfortable listen but it is a stunning attempt, I think, to capture the essence of constant pain through music or sound. It resonates very strongly for me as a straight articulation of tinnitus, of my TMJ problems, and of depression. To be honest I don’t listen to it that often anymore, I find the early part of the drone quite raw now – in fact I’m sat listening to it now and it’s physically uncomfortable. Takes me back to a time and place that I don’t really want to revisit albeit I think that sometimes, in seeking understanding, that I should.

More recently I’ve dug a little into Tweedy’s history and it transpires that, as suspected, “Ghost” had a difficult birth. He has suffered most of his life with migraines as well as anxiety and depression; he believes the former was probably a manifestation of the latter. Whether some of my physical issues – teeth clenching and grinding – have been manifestations of something psychological over the years I don’t know but there’s definitely a temptation to conflate the two. Tweedy ended up addicted to pain killers before getting clean, this record was written and recorded just before that happened, so pretty much at his lowest point. There’s a long piece that he wrote himself for the New York Times (link here) on his health issues which is well worth a read, from that here’s what he says specifically about “Less Than You Think”:

In particular there’s a piece of music — “Less Than You Think” — that ends with a 12-minute drone that was an attempt to express the slow painful rise and dissipation of migraine in music. I don’t know why anyone would need to have that expressed to them musically. But it was all I had.

He also says this on the role music has played for him as a buffer against pain and depression which largely captures, I suppose, what writing the 42 has been about for me:

On a creative level being able to play music and disappear into something as meditative as music can be has been a real blessing in my life.

So, in some respects this is an odd choice. A song that’s mostly not really a song, it’s an extended collage of sounds that try to represent pain that, by my own admission, I can’t listen to very often. It’s telling that I can’t find a video clip of the full track anywhere – the link at the top of the post snips off the drone entirely. If you want to hear it then you’ll have to go and buy (or stream) “A Ghost Is Born”. There’s a ton of other Wilco songs that I love and listen to all the time. You want straight forward Americana tinged rock and roll ? Look no further (Outtasite). You want a sweet poppy love song ? Here you go (You And I). West Coast sunshine harmonies ? Yep (Nothingsevergonnastandinmyway). And that’s before you even get to the masterpiece that is “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” or the rootsy, stripped back “Sky Blue Sky” or the back to basics fun of “Wilco”. They are a brilliant, brilliant band. But this is my choice because it so specifically articulates a part of my life and it’s almost miraculous to me that it came from a set of circumstances that had such strong echoes of my own. I’m also slightly in awe of how Tweedy, in that state of mind, could express himself so cogently.

Is there a point to this post ? You know, a point beyond my odd need to strip away the façade I seem to have built for myself of being a “strong” person, whatever the hell that means. Stoical. Stiff upper lip. Bollocks to that. I guess the point is just to try and tread lightly, treat people with some kindness: they might be carrying burdens they’ll never let you see.

Take the long way, ‘cos I like the view

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31. Take The Long Way – Po’ Girl

There’s a dull ache where my prostate should be and I’m sat in a car I don’t own, in the car park of an anonymous industrial estate on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, a town that seems to be comprised almost entirely of outskirts. I’m waiting for an all day meeting that I’d rather not attend; my expectations are for a painful few hours of corporate jockeying, career eyeing obfuscation and the uncomfortable small talk that only a group of people that really don’t know each other, despite spending every day together for the past three years, can muster. Look up inauspicious in the dictionary. There will be a picture of me in a Vauxhall Astra, eating a double bacon and egg McMuffin, on that industrial estate.

I had spent a good few minutes trying to manoeuvre the car between the white lines that had been marked out for parking. They’re set at an odd angle – perhaps 70 degrees – and are just marginally too narrow. As I’m first to arrive I can’t line up next to an already parked vehicle and, for reasons that now escape me, I had decided to reverse in. Trying to fit between the lines. As I repeatedly try to position the car this feels a lot like one of those free metaphors that life has been throwing at me of late.

I had not been looking forward to this day. Its purpose was for a small group of us to discuss team objectives, in the absence of a head of function, away from the office which, in the grand scheme of things, shouldn’t be cause for concern. Except I’ve been in this play before. Almost exactly twelve months ago: same meeting room in the same industrial shed with the same task to be performed under the same circumstances – no head of team, let’s sort things out. Only twelve months ago the casting was different and, specifically, I had been shunted from understudy to something approaching the lead role. Now I wasn’t even sure if I qualified as understudy.

That day a year ago had, briefly, felt like a fresh beginning. I’ve dealt with my redundancy elsewhere but this had been the point at which I felt like I’d found my way back to some kind of approximation of my previous job; my previous status I guess. I was sharing the responsibility for the running of the day, the running of the team, with someone else but it was close enough. I was back doing what I knew I could do, building a happy and productive insights team.

I was sufficiently emboldened that day to take a risk. The team were dealing with the departure of their “head of” – in retrospect maybe I was dealing with it more than they were, I’m not sure. It was someone I had a lot of respect for and was bitterly disappointed to see him depart and, again in retrospect, it surfaced a lot of memories about how I had left my previous job. So I decided to risk opening up to my colleagues, sharing what was supposed to be my own personal story of dealing with change. I stopped short of a full confessional, complete disclosure of my struggle with mental illness, but there was enough there for people to fill in the blanks. I guess it was intended to be a rallying cry, an illustration of how people can come through traumatic events and stay strong. There’s some irony. It was definitely intended as a show of strength: a sense of resolve and fortitude from what might, ostensibly, appear a place of weakness. It was about empathy and understanding and letting people know that there was someone there for them – my far less eloquent version of this “down in a hole” clip from The West Wing. If you believe the corporate text books it was intended as an overt piece of “authentic leadership”. It was definitely authentic.

And then it all went wrong. Not literally then (people didn’t start throwing things and booing – they may have wanted to…) but over the next couple of months. A series of ordinarily manageable events piling up to a point where they became unmanageable; like dropping enough pebbles onto a hillside until, eventually, it dislodged a boulder, and then the whole thing came tumbling down. Then we’re into panic attacks and adrenaline and cortisol and pills and counseling and all of that stuff.

So back in the car park, a year on, I have all of that in my head. Returning to work after my sabbatical has not been without its challenges, my subconscious seems keen to cling to the fact that I’m back in an environment where I melted down. It’s well intentioned with its occasional prompting – “hey, this is a bad place for you, I remember what happened, I’m going to stimulate some chemicals for you to encourage you to get the fuck out” – but not terribly helpful. I understand the theory of it all but unpicking it in practice – rewiring it – is hard. And this particular car park, outside of the particular meeting room I’m about to go into, is a major crime scene to revisit. If I wasn’t back on beta blockers I imagine I’d be accelerating hard back down the A5 right about now.

I have a playlist that I use for my commute to work. It is, imaginatively, called “car”. Admittedly that isn’t as strong as my Motown playlist – “Good Lordy, It’s Berry Gordy” – but on a par with most of my naming conventions (for example: “new” for, er, new stuff). It was on whilst I sat in the car thinking about the upcoming meeting, set as it usually was to play on shuffle. Sometimes life chucks you a rubbish metaphor about trying to park between the lines whilst you’re wondering where you fit in and sometimes it throws you a bone. Po’ Girl’s glorious reflection on enjoying life’s journey – because that’s the only point to it all – “Take The Long Way” shuffled its way on to the car stereo.

This song was always on the list for inclusion in the 42. I didn’t necessarily expect that this odd tale of mid life crisis would be my route into it but there it is. In some respects it might have been more obvious to pick a moment in my life that was so perfect that it stopped me in my tracks; a moment in which it’s almost easy to understand that this is a moment and that’s probably all that life is, a succession of moments. The sun setting over the ocean in Lanzarote. My wife appearing at the end of the aisle on our wedding day. Sitting holding my new born daughter in the hospital. First kiss. Playing live music. Sex. Any of those would be easy to isolate as moments in which it feels like you can express what life is about. But you don’t get that many of those. What you get are a few of those and, in between, long, long stretches of sitting in car parks – metaphorically, not literally. Unless, of course, you’re a car park attendant.

So it has to be on the list because I utterly adore it, I adore the melody, I adore the vaguely incongruous mix of country and folk and hip hop, but most of all I adore the sentiment. That reminder to be mindful, to savour experience – the journey and not the destination – and that life is not something you’re working towards, it’s something you’re doing. Right now. To steal wholesale from Annie Dillard: how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. All of that time sat in a car park, sat in a meeting room, is life.

It would be too neat and tidy if I told you that in that moment I understood everything I wanted to do with my life. If it was a film I’d have probably driven off, or better still, walked off, casually chucking the keys to a car that wasn’t mine over my shoulder. Maybe deliberately leaving the car parked across the lines first: you see what I did there ? But I don’t (sadly) live in an Aaron Sorkin drama and whilst walking off into a Milton Keynes sunrise might have been glorious for a while it would have been swiftly followed by a dawning realisation that I got responsibilities now.

It was enough, for now, that it reminded me to be present. It was enough that it got me back into that meeting room and got me through that meeting without gasping for air. Right now there are days when that is enough: that is a good day. That won’t always be enough because, how we spend our days and all that, but right now it is.