The anxiety is ever-present. Sometimes only as a form of background noise; a voice that tells me I’ve failed at the day before it’s even begun. At other times it’s more insistent. An almost physical presence. A heart-pounding feeling of dread that makes it a struggle to get out of bed. A longed for desire to go back to sleep, to rewind the clock, in the desperate hope that I could start the day again.
I stare at the clock, calculating how long I can leave it before I have to get out of bed and engage with the day. Another 10 minutes maybe? Twenty if I choose to skip breakfast. Hoping that the anxiety will have passed by the time I do get up, while knowing that every delay merely makes it worse. I know it’s a kind of madness. But it’s one to which I invariably succumb.
Getting up invariably makes me feel a bit better. A little more in control, now that I’ve navigated the day’s first hurdle. I leave the house and head off to work at parliament. There the anxiety becomes less a free-floating existential black cloud and more a focused reality.
Don’t get me wrong. Being the Guardian’s political sketchwriter is my perfect job, one I never dreamed of having when I began my career as a journalist. And there has never been a better time to be a satirist. But that creates pressures of its own. I worry that I’m not being funny enough, that I’m missing the main events of the day, that I’m letting people down. The higher the stakes, the greater the risk of failure. Then there are my concerns for the future of the country. Watching our politicians close up gives me no confidence that they have any solutions. Brexit is not the ideal companion for anyone who is naturally insecure.
I’ve never been entirely sure why I’m so anxious. All I know is that it’s been part of me since I was a child. Home always felt slightly transient, never entirely safe. For most of my adolescence I muddled through, my own anxieties seemingly mirrored in those around me and medicated by drinking and taking drugs. After university, I became a heroin addict. Not by accident, but by design. I craved unconsciousness, a state of not being me. An existence where all my worries could be narrowed down and sublimated into the getting and using of heroin. It wasn’t much of a life, but it was about the only approximation to one that I could manage.
At the age of 30 – somewhat to my surprise – I realised that my desire to live was greater than my desire to die. I had started to overdose regularly and knew I would probably be dead within a year if I carried on as I had been. With the help of family and friends, I first went into rehab and then started going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings. I stopped taking drugs and drinking. My recovery had begun.
It was like learning to be a functioning human being again from scratch. How to get and hold down a job. How to form meaningful relationships with other people. I took to it well. I started making a career as a writer. My wife and I felt able to have children of our own. But I was still the same, anxious me that I had been as a child – albeit a more successful version. Stopping taking drugs had given me back my life, but hadn’t changed my fundamental personality. Despite years of NA meetings and therapy, deep down I was still insecure, anxious and depressed.
Ten years into recovery, I was diagnosed with acute anxiety and depression and was hospitalised for a month. Since then, I have been on antidepressants and continued with therapy. Both of which work, but are not infallible. There have been many occasions when it has felt overwhelming. And even on a good day, anxiety is never far away. Not dormant so much as latent. It corrodes from the inside out, spoiling everything with which it comes in contact.
The thing is, I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a wonderful family, great friends and a dream job. I’m also alive when many of the people I’ve known are dead. I just wish I could enjoy my life more. Be in the moment.
All I can do is keep trying to do the right things. Taking my medication and going to therapy. Taking lots of exercise: as much for my mental as physical wellbeing – since having a knee replacement I can’t run, so I crank up the resistance on the cross-trainer in the gym and sweat for an hour. Not so much a training session as a demolition derby that eliminates stress and leaves me feeling nothing but the pain of the exertion. Not altogether healthy maybe, but effective.
Getting out of bed in the morning: that helps too. Not always managing, but trying to be the best version of me. However imperfect that may be. And yes, the good days – make that the better days – do outnumber the bad. Result.
John Crace is the Guardian’s parliamentary sketchwriter
