“Indeed since Kirkegaard (in the 1840s) the extistentials have sought to explain this particular human anxiety as the dread we feel when we realize life is finite.” Sarah Wilson, First We Make the Beast Beautiful
The first time I experienced this dread was between the ages of about 5 and 7. Standing at the door to the garage at my family home pleading silently with the universe for the automatic garage door to move, indicating that mum was home and not dead in a mangled, overturned car where my imagination had placed her. I experienced this awareness of lifes ephemeral nature acutely, unable to move, fixed to the spot, frozen in fear. My bemused father tried to coax me away from the door but to no avail.
The next serious patch of anxiety was when I was about 13 and I became terrified that I might be gay. In what would become my usual style when I was overwhelmed by pure fear, I kept my lips sealed and my fears to myself, obsessing over the possibility and struck dumb by the what ifs. Finally I caved and confessed to my best friend what had been eating at my insides. I can’t remember exactly what she said but her kind, loving presence and innate wisdom meant that the fear evaporated almost instantly. In a way I think that there is no better feeling than relief. The joyousness of realizing that everything is ok, that your worst fears are unfounded. It’s a cycle I have repeated in various different ways my whole life. Pressure weighing down on me like concrete, pressing pressing until it gets too much and I roll out from underneath, normally in a messy, sobbing but relieved and still-alive heap.
I well up now as I write this, overwhelmed by the beauty and the pain of life and by the truth in my words. The unveiling of my face, the truth of me, the saying of it, the “Hello, I have lived a bucket of a life which has been filled over and over again with cycles of anxiety and relief and I am also imaginative and contemplative and articulate and still alive and here I am.” In this moment I am nowhere else and because that doesnt happen very often I rejoice in it, bathe in it and of course then wonder how I can fix it in place and then start worrying about how few and far between these moments are. That state of flow is like something clicking into place, it’s an undoing and a current and it feels a bit like magic. I get it when I’m writing, or deep in a conversation or drawing or dancing. For you my reader friend it might be cooking, or gardening or knitting or whatever makes the whirlpool in your head turn into an ocean.
The unhelpful thing about anxiety is that the solution is often the problem. When I say that I mean that my most recent bout was sitting atop a deep sadness about not feeling known. A hiding away, a fear of being seen for who I am. This followed a rejection by a boyfriend but the neurotic nature of it is that the thing I want most is the thing I fear. I am still working on this one, how to let people see me, but I continue because I know that freedom is the prize. No pretending, no hiding, no shame, just courage to be seen and to be fully human.