on safety
continuing my feelings-posting with safety, anxiety, risk and what to do when your head tells you that you are not safe
I am not safe, my head tells me. It’s Saturday morning and I have been woken up by anxiety for the first time in seven years. Seven years ago, being woken by feeling like my guts were growing teeth was one of the things that made me realise my life was unbearable enough that I needed to change. I asked a doctor to check me for asthma, he told me I was fine, I’m probably ‘just’ anxious, and I cried and cried and said I am not safe, I am not safe. I got sober, and after things got worse, they got better and I stopped being ripped from sleep by a scream no one else could hear. Until Saturday, there it was, like it had never left.
It is 7:00am and I move to the corner of the room I’ve made into home and ask myself what I’m afraid of, so I can check the facts. I reply, I don’t know, I just don’t feel safe. I tell myself it’s ok, and take myself for a walk in Haggerston Park, not too big, not too small, I have the route I like to repeat around it three times when the world feels too big. I wear the green jacket which the guy who runs the kebab shop next to me says is the one thing he can count on. ‘Everything is temporary, except you wearing that coat.’ Cars are too loud, dogs look too unpredictable and I jump at everything that brushes against me, but being outside helps.
It’s 7:15am, most of my support network is still asleep, but I tell the scared thing inside me, it’s ok, I’ve got you. I feel like a mother trying to console a small child, though she is on the same boat that is sinking and is just as scared. It’s in this moment I remember that I believe in a higher power and ask it to remove my fear. The fear remains, and I remember that god will move the mountain but I have to bring the shovel, so I keep walking, wondering if I would be so afraid if I was religious. I keep walking and listen to the Three Body Problem on audiobook. It does not help, I listen to Dynamite by Taio Cruz and remember that that is the oddly specific song that through some weird Pavlovian response snaps me out of depression and not fear. I listen to nothing, because it’s easier that way.