Today, Matthew, I Am Going To Be Stressed Out Of My Tiny Mind

I am so fucking anxious. Heart-palpitation levels of anxious. Three espresso jitters anxious. Sick to my stomach with it. I cannot sit to read levels of stress. I’m not bothered about food because everything makes me feel sick. I feel like I’m having a heart attack every fifteen minutes.

The reassuring thing is that I have actual things in my life that are causing this anxiety. It isn’t a nameless dread. My dread very much has a name. Unfortunately it is not a dread I can do much about except wait for time and tide to decide how things will play out. So I have been wrestling with my anxiety for much of the day despite the fact that I can’t really stop the relentless juggernaut of my life to deal with it satisfactorily. Borders must be weeded. Bushes must be hacked into submission. Bedlinen and towels have to be rationalised. There is so much to do. I do not have time to hide under the duvet or become a hermit, however much I might like to.

I have seriously been considering the hermit option. I don’t want to live in a grotto or a bee skep and I’m very bad at growing a beard but I could style it out.

I feel like the people in Ted Hughes’ poem, Wind:

…we grip our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other.

But I must get on, so I do. Goodness it is hard. It is as hard as meditation. It’s sitting down knowing I need to relax and breathe and become a passive observer and empty my thoughts and instantly being beset by a thousand devils who were only waiting for their moment to pounce. The immediate feeling of being wildly uncomfortable and being fairly sure I will never be comfortable again. The annoying chatter and counter chatter of my inner voices arguing about the best way to relax and very often, for me, the almost impossible to resist urge to get up and run away as fast as I can, shouting incoherently.

This has been my day:

I think I will put that anxiety inducing thought down. I think I will go and do something to keep me busy. I dive headfirst into a laurel bush with my secateurs in hand. I pick up the thought. I savagely prune a branch. I put the thought down. I go and get a bin bag and start stuffing all the clippings into it. I pick the thought up again. I leave the pruning and go and sort out the wet washing. I am still dogged by anxiety. At this point I am not even aware that I have stopped emptying the washing machine and am staring into the middle distance holding a wet towel, gripping onto it for dear life as my thoughts fly away from me. I begin to spiral. I go back to the pruning. I think I might die in this bush. I climb out of the bush. I go and sort out a mountain of sheets. I lie on them, like the princess and the pea, except that I am a hyperventilating peasant with no pea. I think I might burst into tears. I go back outside to the bush of penance. I realise I have been clenching my jaw so hard I now have a headache.

I want to get up and run away as fast as I can, shouting incoherently.

Instead I go to the corner shop and buy hummus, which I eat with Doritos for my tea because I can’t deal with any food that isn’t beige right now. Ideally life needs to be beige right now, but that isn’t an option, so hummus it is.