LIVING WITH ANXIETY

This morning I woke up in a panic. I was worried that the electrical set up of our kitchen appliances constituted a major fire hazard. Two years ago we had a new fridge freezer fitted, and the guy who installed it said the electrics looked a bit dodgy. It wasn’t within his remit to advise what to do, so he just installed the thing and went on his way. It’s been fine ever since, and I haven’t really thought about it. Until this morning, when I woke up in a maelstrom of terror. I’m currently waiting for the emergency electrician to come and take a look, and will probably pay through the nose for peace of mind.*

This is what living with anxiety is like. Normal life events become a case of fire fighting. My brain is constantly scanning for things that might go wrong. Are the windows in our flat suitable for jumping ouf of, in case there is a fire? Do we have the proper insurance? Are the flights booked for when we go away? Is my website set up correctly? Did I inadvertently plagiarise a poem? Did I just go through a red traffic light?

Talking of cars, I had a borderline mental breakdown in 2018, the year of my wedding, when I thought I was going to get a driving ban. The wedding was occupying a lot of my thought, and I was also doing a lot of driving for work, often in unfamiliar parts of the country. Perhaps because my mind was elsewhere, I ended up accruing a series of penalty points for some fairly minor infractions. I was at risk of a driving ban, and had to go to court in Leamington to plead my case. Luckily I wasn’t banned, but boy – the anxiety was something else. And because I actually have a certified anxiety disorder, my mind went to all kinds of weird and wonderful places: What if I end up in the local paper: ‘Children’s Poet Gets Driving Ban’? What if schools don’t want to employ me because of this? What if what if what if?

My anxiety is intermingled with OCD. OCD means that I get certain, highly specific worries in my mind, and literally can’t relax or do anything else until I think I’ve solved them. It never gets properly solved though; the worries just find new ways to intrude. The real way to deal with it is simply to sit with the anxiety until it goes away. That’s the theory anyway. Much easier said than done. Because anxiety and OCD are technically separate conditions, they affect me in slightly different ways. Anxiety is a response to normal life events (such as the electrics in the kitchen) that get blown way out of proportion in my mind; OCD can latch on to things that are a little bit more, well, weird. It also thrives around transitions – getting married, moving house, having a baby, getting a new job – and attempts to hijack it. It saps joy. It causes misery. 

I say that anxiety and OCD are technically separate conditions; this is according to the DSM, a document that doctors have produced in an attempt to codify and classify diagnoses. My own lived experience, however, tells me that they are actually very hard to disentangle. I’m not sure how much I trust the DSM anyway. I know that its utility is often disputed among professionals. 

Take the issue of world events. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I have been obsessed with geopolitics. The nuclear spectre has loomed extremely large, but the fear of conventional war in Europe is pretty intense too. Anxiety around this issue would be pretty normal, and I spend a lot of my time, sometimes whole days, 24/7, worried about it. For myself and for future generations. But OCD plays a part as well, in the form of compulsions which are undertaken in a misguided attempt to relieve the anxiety. These involve obsessively checking the news, and also asking questions to AI. I do this until I get the answer I want, then do it all over again as soon as another scary headline hits the news. It’s exhausting.

Part of living with anxiety and OCD is the sensation of not going anywhere. Of staying still. Stuck. I said earlier that I might worry about whether our windows are safe enough in the event of a fire. Do I do anything to actually check the windows? No. I just worry about it. The energy gets used up in the worry, rather than any action I might undertake. Do I actually get involved with organisations that might help contribute to global safety? Not really. I just obsessively worry about it. I didn’t leave home until I was 27. I was single for ten years before meeting my wife, because I got too anxious to form a relationship. I took years to decide to get married. And years more to decide to do other things that might advance my life. One of the reasons I love my wife is that she is a do-er. She wants to move forward. We complement each other well. I think. (Am I going to start obsessing over this, now?...)

I’m not sure why I wrote this blog post. Maybe it’s simply to give others a flavour of what my mind is like, and to let those whose minds work in similar ways know that they are not alone. Maybe there are some benefits to the anxiety too: I am fastidious in my writing, and scrupulous in my desire to be a good husband. But it’s all very tiring. Sending big love to all, wherever and whoever you are. 

*The electrician came, said everything was OK, and charged £230.