That Other Me
I don’t remember a time in my life before anxiety.
I do remember having too many thoughts, too big an imagination, and too wide a gulf between my highs and lows.
The anxiety in my teens was a separator – it separated me from the other kids. I could stand with them. I could joke with them. I could pretend to be one of them – one of the humans. But inside, my mind raged, and sometimes it went inexplicably dark, delving into an unfathomable melancholy.
There was no way to understand any of this – no internet where I could Google answers. The school library offered nothing. The school didn’t have a counsellor, like I’d see in TV shows. The 1980s didn’t openly acknowledge this shit existed.
Nor did you talk about it with kids your age. Kids were unforgiving. They would ridicule and ostracise anybody different. Their only understanding of any conditions were “retard” and “crazy”. That was the extent of any diagnosis.
But I ploughed on, trying to fit in with that teenage fatalism where being accepted and part of a clique is a life imperative, trying to make myself work, even when those caveats created gulfs, and those gulfs delineated what an impostor I was.
That first panic attack when I was 18 was the recognition of the fault line in my head. Something was fractured in there – I don’t know when it cracked. There was no major trauma in life that I recall. Given my mum had post-natal with my oldest brother and had suffered anxiety since, and given there’s some interesting mental illness in our line generations ago, I can only imagine it’s hereditary.
Through no intention of my own, I set up a sentry in my head to be hyper vigilant. That sentry has not rested – ever. He’s relentless. And paranoid. Too conscious of possible eruptions. The problem is he’s not very smart. He can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what he’s catastrophizing.
While friends around me were graduating, going to study in university or getting jobs, I was dealing with the public health system, and an over-zealous psychiatrist who thought I might be schizophrenic (although I didn’t find this out until years later). He set me up for over fifteen years of worry I might grow psychotic, and threw too many meds at me.
The one thing I learned to do well was mask. Conservative Greek parents didn’t want others knowing that their son had issues. Nobody else had issues – well, not from external observation. Functions I missed were due to “colds”, or other similar afflictions.
I learned to wear that mask as much as possible – learned to hammer it over everything else so that it became a façade of my life. I didn’t grow excited when I got my first book deal. It was just something that happened. I don’t oooh over celebrities. People say even when I drink lots, it’s hard to tell. (Although people who don’t know me think that when I drink, I become manic and animated, but if you know me in everyday life, that’s me anyway.)
It became an ongoing war not only trying to gain ground, but to conquer the anxiety and evict that fucking sentry. Every fear became a threat. Would I snap, and be jailed behind the inexorable mental health issues raging in my head while they ran rampant and I became the crazy I thought was possible? Would I hear voices? Or lose touch with reality?
Everybody does what they have to do to get on with life. We wake up, we go to work, we commit to partners and/or kids, we socialize as a release, and we’re constantly looking outward at the next step we take. We think about what we’re going to do with a commitment to something external – get a new TV, find a new house, get a new job, eat better and exercise so we look better, make more money, and everything that drives contemporary society.
Anxiety’s when your focus turns award, and now I don’t remember a time it hasn’t been like that – like the scars on my right arm, where they inserted plates after I’d broken both bones playing football when I was 15. I don’t remember that right arm ever being unblemished. Every time I look at it, all I can think is that’s the way it always has been.
The self-awareness that becomes everyday is like hitting the bottom, then finding a way to burrow deeper.
Deeper until there’s nothing else but the act of digging.