Notes on a Nervous Planet(4)

Invisible sharks

ONE FRUSTRATION WITH anxiety is that it is often hard to find a reason behind it. There may be no visible threat and yet you can feel utterly terrified. It’s all intense suspense, no action. It’s like Jaws without the shark.

But often there are sharks. Metaphorical, invisible sharks. Because even when we sometimes feel we are worried for no reason, the reasons are there.

‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat,’ said Chief Brody, in Jaws itself.

And maybe that’s the problem for us, too. Not the metaphorical sharks but our metaphorical boats. Maybe we would cope with the world better if we knew where those sharks were, and what we need to navigate the waters of life unscathed.





Crash

I SOMETIMES FEEL like my head is a computer with too many windows open. Too much clutter on the desktop. There is a metaphorical spinning rainbow wheel inside me. Disabling me. And if only I could find a way to switch off some of the frames, if only I could drag some of the clutter into the trash, then I would be fine. But which frame would I choose, when they all seem so essential? How can I stop my mind being overloaded when the world is overloaded? We can think about anything. And so it makes sense that we end up sometimes thinking about everything. We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.





Things that are faster than they used to be

Mail.

Cars.

Olympic sprinters.

News.

Processing power.

Photographs.

Scenes in movies.

Financial transactions.

Journeys.

World population growth.

The deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.

Navigation.

Technological progress.

Relationships.

Political events.

The thoughts in your head.





24/7 catastrophe

WORRY IS A small, sweet word that sounds like you could keep an eye on it. Yet worry about the future – the next ten minutes, the next ten years – is the chief obstacle I have to being able to live in and appreciate the present moment.

I am a catastrophiser. I don’t simply worry. No. My worry has real ambition. My worry is limitless. My anxiety – even when I don’t have capital-A Anxiety – is big enough to go anywhere. I have always found it easy to think of the worst-case scenario and dwell on it.

And I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. I have gone to the doctor many times, convinced of my imminent demise because of an illness I’ve googled myself into having. As a child, if my mum was late picking me up from primary school it would only take about a minute for me to convince myself she had probably died in a hideous car accident. That never happened, but it’s continual not-happening-ness never stopped the possibility that it could happen. Every moment my mother wasn’t there was a moment in which she might never be there again.

The ability to imagine catastrophe in horrific detail, to picture the mangled metal and the spray of white-blue glass glittering on the road, occupied my mind far more than the rational idea that such a catastrophe was unlikely. If Andrea doesn’t pick up her phone I can’t help but think a likely scenario is that she has fallen down the stairs or maybe even spontaneously combusted. I worry that I upset people without meaning to. I worry that I don’t check my privilege enough. I worry about people being in prison for crimes they didn’t do. I worry about human rights abuses. I worry about prejudice and politics and pollution and the world my children and their entire generation are inheriting from us. I worry about all the species going extinct because of humans. I worry about my carbon footprint. I worry about all the pain in the world that I am not actively able to stop. I worry about how much I’m wrapped up in myself, which makes me even more wrapped up in myself.

Years before I ever had actual sex I found it easy to imagine I had AIDS, so powerful were the British Government’s terrifying public awareness TV slots in the 1980s. If I eat food that tastes a little funny, I immediately imagine I will be hospitalised from food poisoning, even though I have only had food poisoning once in my life.

I can’t be at an airport and not feel – and therefore act – suspicious.

Every new lump or ulcer or mole is a potential cancer. Every memory lapse is early-onset Alzheimer’s. On and on and on. And all this is when I am feeling relatively okay. When I’m ill the catastrophising goes into overdrive.

In fact, now I think about it, that is the chief characteristic of anxiety for me. The continual imagining of how things could get so much worse. And it is only recently that I have been understanding how much the world feeds into this. How our mental states – whether we are actually ill or just stressed out – are to a degree products of social states. And vice versa. I want to understand what it is about this nervous planet that gets in.

There is a world of difference between feeling a bit stressed and being properly ill, but as with, say, hunger and starvation, the two are related in that what is bad for one (lack of food) is also bad for the other. And so, when I am well – but stressed – the things that make me feel a little bit worse are often the things that make me feel much worse when I am ill. What you learn when you are ill, about what hurts, can then be applied to the better times, too. Pain is one hell of a teacher.