Notes on a Nervous Planet(28)

So, anyway, I was there, in this pit, desperately trying to find a way out as every escape route seemed to be closing.

And, as many people in this situation discover, you acquire evidence like a detective trying to solve a murder. At first there were no clues, or none I could see. Every day in that pit was hell. Every day, in those first few weeks and months, contained moments of such heavy emotional pain that they stopped any hope breaking through. But the pain, I started to realise, although internal, often had external triggers. There was nothing I had found that made me feel better. Then I realised that certain things could make me feel worse: drinking alcohol, smoking, loud music, crowds. The world gets in. It always gets in, however we are doing. But until I became ill, I never knew how.





Note to self KEEP CALM. KEEP going. Keep human. Keep pushing. Keep yearning. Keep perfecting. Keep looking out the window. Keep focus. Keep free. Keep ignoring the trolls. Keep ignoring pop-up ads and pop-up thoughts. Keep risking ridicule. Keep curious. Keep hold of the truth. Keep loving. Keep allowing yourself the human privilege of mistakes. Keep a space that is you and put a fence around it. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep your phone at arm’s length. Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. Keep breathing. Keep inhaling life itself.

Keep remembering where stress can lead.

(Keep remembering that day in the shopping centre.)





Fear and shopping

I WAS IN a shopping centre, crying.

Me, aged 24, surrounded by crowds of people and shops and illuminated signs, unable to cope.

‘No,’ I whispered, as my breathing lost its rhythm. ‘I can’t do this.’

‘Matt?’

It had been a test. To go with Andrea, then my girlfriend, to this city near her parents’ home – Newcastle, in the north of England – and do some shopping. I had no idea what we were shopping for. My focus was simply on making it through without having a panic attack.

To be like any other normal person.

‘I’m sorry, I just can’t, I . . .’

There I was. Pathetic. A young man. In a world that had told me – everywhere from TV shows to the school sports field – that being a man means being strong and tough and silent in the face of pain, a world that showed us that being young was about having fun and being free in the bright, shining land of youth. And here I was, in the supposed prime of my life, crying about nothing in a shopping centre. Well, it wasn’t really about nothing. It was about pain. And terror. A pain and terror I had never known until a little over a month before, while working in Spain, when I had a panic attack that started and didn’t stop and then became fused with a terrible, indescribable sense of dread and malaise and hopelessness which seeped into my flesh and bones.

The despair had been so strong that it had very nearly taken my life. There had seemed no way out. However scary death was, this living terror had seemed worse. Everyone has a limit – a point at which they can’t take any more – and, almost out of nowhere, I had reached mine.

‘It’s all right,’ Andrea was saying, holding my hand. More mother or nurse than girlfriend in that moment.

‘No, it isn’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

‘Did you take the diazepam this morning?’

‘Yes, but it’s not working.’

‘It’s going to be all right. It’s just panic.’

Just panic.

Her concerned eyes made it worse. I’d already put her through so much. All I had to do was walk. Walk and talk and breathe like a normal human being. It wasn’t rocket science. But right then, it might as well have been.

‘I can’t.’

Andrea’s face hardened now. Her jaw clenched and mouth tightened. Even she had limits. She was cross at me and for me. ‘You can do it.’

‘No, Andi, I really fucking can’t. You don’t understand.’

People were looking at us, casting sideways glances in our direction as they walked along weighed down with carrier bags.

‘Just breathe. Just breathe slowly.’

I tried to breathe deep, but the air could hardly make it beyond my throat.

‘I . . . I . . . I . . . There’s no air.’

Earlier in the day, I hadn’t been feeling as bad as this. Just a low-level unshiftable despair. On the bus into the city, the fear had crept over me, like being slowly wrapped in an itchy blanket.

Now my whole body was alive with terror.

I was frozen right there, standing outside Vision Express, surrounded by life yet alone. I began to swallow. To try to direct myself. Compulsive swallowing had been one of a few mild OCD symptoms I had developed. This time I was actually wanting that symptom just to distract me from a worse one. But it didn’t work.

There was no hope. There was no way out. Life was for other people.

I had held back the world, and now it was caving in. And Andrea’s voice became something far away, the last hope, trying to reach the person I no longer was.





You only have one mind

WHEN I LOOK back on the shopping centre experience – one experience among many similar ones that sometimes burst into my brain like a Vietnam flashback without the violence – I try to dissect it. I relive the past in order to accept it and learn from it. Not just to learn how not to have panic attacks, but to learn how my mind intersects with the world and work out how to be less stressed generally.