Notes on a Nervous Planet(29)

The first problem was that it took place within my earliest experience of anxiety and depression. When you have a bout of mental illness for the first time, you imagine this is how your life is going to be for ever. You will have depression punctuated by panic attacks and that is how things will stay. And that was terrifying. The claustrophobia of it. There seemed no way out.

The second problem was that I still had no idea how to deal with panic attacks. That lesson was going to take years to learn.

And the third problem was that I didn’t understand how the external and the internal were connected. I didn’t know how related ‘what you feel’ is to ‘where you are’. I didn’t know that the world of shops and sales and marketing is not always good for minds. A lot of research has been done in recent years about the effect of external environments on our health. For instance, a 2013 study commissioned by the mental health charity Mind and run by the University of Essex compared the experience of walking in a shopping centre with a ‘green walk’ around Belhus Woods Country Park in Essex. Although walking is known to be good for a mind – indoors or outdoors – 44 per cent of the people who walked in a shopping centre said they felt a decrease in self-esteem. Whereas nearly all (90 per cent) of the people who went for the forest walk felt their self-esteem increase. There is an increasing amount of research like this, as I’ll mention later, about how nature is good for our minds. But at the time I knew none of that. Indeed, most of the research hadn’t been done.

It makes sense that shopping centres aren’t easy places to be in. A shopping centre is a deliberately stimulating environment, designed not to calm or comfort, but merely to get us to spend money. And as anxiety is often a trigger for consumption, feeling calm and satisfied would probably work against the shopping centre’s best interests. Calmness and satisfaction – in the agenda of the shopping centre – are destinations we reach by purchasing. Not places already there.

The fourth problem was guilt. I felt guilty about symptoms I didn’t really see as symptoms of an illness. I saw them as symptoms of me-ness.

Another lesson I am still coming to understand – and writing this book is helping me – is that distraction didn’t and doesn’t work. For one thing, shopping centres are deliberately very distracting environments, but they didn’t take me out of myself, only into myself. The bustling crowds of other people didn’t help connect me to humanity. I felt more alone among masses of people than I did when it was just me and one other person, or even just myself.

This was an already familiar tactic of mine: trying to distract myself from one torment by finding another. Years before Twitter, and the mind-numbing compulsive checking of social media, I had the desperate need for distraction. But it was no good. You develop symptoms more by fighting them than inviting them. Distraction is an attempt to escape that rarely works. You don’t put out a fire by ignoring the fire. You have to acknowledge the fire. You can’t compulsively swallow or tweet or drink your way out of pain. There comes a point at which you have to face it. To face yourself. In a world of a million distractions you are still left with only one mind.





The mannequins who inflict pain

WHEN I NOW think of that particular panic attack I think of how the world got in. Even at the time I had an instinctive – if not totally conscious – idea of the triggers around me. Even a shop’s mannequins added to it.

There I was. In that enclosed and busy and artificial commercial space. Past the point of no return. My own personal singularity. The rational knowledge, as I looked at Andrea, that I was in the all too familiar process of ruining our day.

I closed my eyes to escape the stimulation of the shopping centre and saw nothing but monsters and demons, a mental bank of creatures and images worse than any hydra or cyclops – my own personal underworld that was now only ever a blink or a thought away.

‘Come on, you can do it. Breathe slowly.’

I tried to do what she said: to breathe slowly, but the air didn’t feel like air. It didn’t feel like anything. My self didn’t feel like anything.

I wiped my eyes.

Opposite Vision Express was a clothes shop. I can’t remember which one. But what I can remember, printed with the weight of trauma in my memory, is that there were mannequins in dresses in the window. The kind of mannequins with heads. Heads which were grey and hairless and with features that hinted abstractly at a nose and eyes, but no mouth. The mannequins stood in unnatural angular poses.

They seemed deeply malevolent. As if they were sentient beings who not only knew my pain, but were part of it. Were partly responsible for it.

Indeed, this would be a key feature of my anxiety and depression over the following months and years. The sense that parts of the world contained a secret external malevolence that could press a despairing weight and pain into you. It could be found in a smiling face on a glossy magazine. It could be found in the devilish red stare of rear tail-lights. Or the too-bright blue glow of a computer screen.

And yes, it could be found in the sinister echo of humanity in a shop mannequin.

One day, when I was ready to face my pain, this feeling of extreme sensitivity would actually help me. It would help me understand that if external things could have a negative impact, then other external things might have a positive impact. But right then I was worried I was losing my mind.

I was convinced I wasn’t made for the reality of the world. And in a way, I was right. I wasn’t made for the world. I was, like everyone, made by the world. I was made by parents and culture and TV and books and politics and school and maybe even shopping centres.