This too will pass

#worldmentalhealthday

There are certain words, like a name, that follow you throughout your life. Words that have meaning, that signify something definite but perhaps not at all that clear. Words that you had no role in selecting. They are used so often in reference to you that you don’t generally question what it is that is being referred to. What is that label? The one that is your name or the one that inhabits a large part of your lived experience? What does it mean? Does it say something about you or the world or how others view you in the world? Is it fixed? Is it real or imagined?

One of those words, for me, is ANXIETY. Or did I mean, anxiety? Or maybe, anxiety.

I’ve never really known what it is. People say it’s lots of things. People say that depression (hello other familiar labels) is about being stuck in the past. And anxiety is being stuck in the future. That doesn’t seem right. My anxiety has always been about the now - the now on repeat, a physical sensation gone wrong, a pain. It’s a dull throbbing, a sharp spikey prod, a ghostly almost-thing, in my fingertips like static, in my side like a soaking sponge laying heavy and ominous.

I first knew it when I was 8. I was at school and suddenly couldn’t swallow. A lump without form moved in and my school lunch spaghetti stopped mid-swallow, choking and freezing me in paralysed terror. I bolted up from my bench, coughing, face turning red, wide-eyed with shame as the spaghetti threatened to poke out of my mouth, dangling there like a thread come loose from its needle. After I had recovered it continued to happen. It would lay dormant and then suddenly appear, mostly when I tried to eat. Never with any obvious cause or trigger. I don’t remember seeing anyone about it. It didn’t call itself by its name. Instead it was given gravitas, a latin title, hystericus globus by my doctor parents. The act of naming it ended any further action.

Over the years it has re-invented itself, re-branded, taken new names. There has been supraventricular tachycardia, temporomandibular disorder, intercostal muscular pain. Eventually I stopped getting checked, stopped checking and the final form, anxiety, became the name for all of those physical symptoms. It loomed large and foreboding as I became more and more frightened of all the things in my body that could suddenly demand my attention at a moment’s notice, without warning. I became hyper attuned to pain, unable to read side-effects leaflets as at any moment that other thing could take charge and manifest them, to torment me.

Most conventional wisdom on anxiety counsels staying in the moment, being present, elastic band ping, body scanning, mindful breathing. Things that are the very source of my fear. When my anxiety wakes me up in the middle of the night it is the fact that I am there, in that moment, and the next moment and the next that is so unbearable. Rational thinking does not work when you are covered in sweat and afraid to make any movement lest it will be your last. Concentrating on your breathing is a dangerous activity because you have become so afraid of your body you are worried it will stop doing it, just to fuck with you.

So for now I have settled upon a new form of words to fight that one word that seems indelibly stuck with me. When anxiety strikes I attempt to pacify it with a chant: this too will pass. It’s not perfect. The irony of using a form of words that encapsulates my ultimate fear is not lost on me. But it is a way to control my narrative, to drive a repetition of something that I have chosen, rather than the repetition of the thing in my body that has demanded my attention once more.

This too will pass. This too will pass.