One of my great guilty pleasures is the “Writer’s Rooms” feature in the Guardian Books section, probably because it combines two of my passions: writing, and critiquing other people’s homes.  On which note I must say that I simply do not understand writers who position their desks anywhere but directly in front of a window.  If I had to stare at a wall (even an expensive wall in one of London’s most exclusive postcodes) all day I’d go mad.

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It would be too easy to turn the whole wretched thing into one of those “tragedy of the modern era” stories you see in publications like People and Time.  Young girl, private school, possessed of a certain type of intelligence and ambition, studies herself silly in the hopes of going to a good college; then gets into the good college and studies herself silly in the hopes of getting a good job.  Makes herself sick–physically, but mostly emotionally–doing so.  It’s this era of relentless competition that’s  to blame; it’s the speed at which we live, all the pressures, the sheer strain of surviving.  She’s one of many faces in the magazine article, with a caption, a rueful smile, a cautionary tale.

But the truth is I went to an ordinary college and I succeeded at school, whenever I did, mostly out of an unnatural love for reading books.  I never felt any outside pressure to perform and if I was ambitious it was only in the vaguest of ways.

I didn’t even actively worry, most of the time.  It was only at night, thoughts of the day subdued by the strangeness of the dark, that I started to feel that things were wrong, that I was–quite literally–upside down.  The vertigo came first; then fear of the vertigo, fear so strong that I would feel dizzy and ill just to think of it.  And once you’ve started that useless cycle of thought, it’s going to be a fight to free yourself from it.

So it’s simple, not tragic, to explain: I worried. And then, because I worried, I worried some more.

Is my anxiety inherited?  Self-induced?  An inevitable result of living in a fast-paced world?  Probably all three.  After a few half-hearted attempts to find a life-changing shrink (hint: never see someone because someone else has told you to; but for God’s sake if you do, don’t tell the therapist that’s why you’re there) I gathered that, like most other things, my inclination to fret has many roots and many reasons, only a few of which I have any measure of control over.

But it wouldn’t be fair to say I’m a victim of anxiety, or indeed of anything.  This is not a girl versus the world story.  If it’s got to be anything then let it be a girl versus herself story.  And it may sound lazy but in some ways the biggest thing that girl ever did to help herself, and by extension everyone around her, was to get over her prejudice and ask her doctor if there was anything he could prescribe.

There was.  Would I say it changed the way I thought, turned me into someone else?  No.  But a few weeks after swallowing the first pill, I started to notice something.  It was subtle, but what it felt like when I could feel anything was the world, having been capsized, finally righting herself.  If you imagine what it’s like to live with your jaw constantly clenched and every sound accompanied by the kind of noise you get when you can’t quite tune into a radio station, and then to wake up one morning to find your whole face relaxed, each sound clear–well, that’s it. I remember a feeling of euphoria hitting me one day.  I’d just moved back to Boston after a summer at home in California; I had a new apartment, it was the best season to be on the East Coast, and the window was wide open to let in the city air.

But there’s a point at which you have to say to yourself that, having re-learned what life without unhealthy anxiety is like, you’re going to need to re-learn how to live that life unassisted by anything but sheer will-power.  I had a few false starts.  More than a few false starts, even.  I remember calling the Man in tears, a few months after I’d got my degree and moved back to Oxford, saying I didn’t know why I felt so sad, and could he please make the dizziness stop?  It was midwinter and each breath was full of nothing but cold and empty air; so I decided to wait.  But in springtime it wasn’t any easier; I sweated through the sheets at night and had, one weekend, to cut short an already short few days away so I could get home, where I’d left my pills.

But then, about a month ago, I was due for a routine check-up with my doctor, and we had a casual chat, while he sneezed profusely over his keyboard and cursed his hay fever and I sent my regards from a mutual friend, and it’s funny how you can tell sometimes that the timing is right.  So I’m, as they say, weaning myself off.  It’s a slow process, as it’s meant to be.  And this time around, I’ll be able to use the knowledge I’m armed with.  Will everything be perfect after?  Of course not. I’ll still fret, I’ll still obsess, and I’ll still have ups and downs.

But I’ll say this.  The other day, I met a newborn baby for the first time; and then I went to the pub and wrote a few thousand words over a pint of cider while I waited for the Man to meet me, and at a certain point I looked up and I felt euphoric.  And the euphoria had nothing whatsoever to do with the little white pills I was-or-wasn’t taking.

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…on the shelf:

• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh edited by Michael Davie
• Selected Poems by Louis MacNeice (a constant presence, of late)
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• British Poetry Since 1945 edited by Edward Lucie-Smith
• Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn
• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

…on spotify:

• Stuart Murdoch
• Polly Scattergood
• Florence + The Machine
• Fleet Foxes
• Neko Case
• Regina Spektor
• Take That (Yes, really.  I’m convinced that in many ways “Shine” is the ultimate walking-down-the-street-on-a-sunny-summer-day tune)
• Johnny Flynn

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There seems to have been a mass-migration of Tibetan monks to our street.  It’s nice; it adds a splash of red-and-orange to the grey-green Summer streets.  The sky can never decide from one moment to the next whether it wants to be blue or hide behind the auspices of a silver cloud duvet.  The trees are still in all their midsummer glory, and the area at the back of our garden still looks like a jungle.  Ruined watering cans in a haphazard pattern near the compost bin, which is nearly concealed now by the low branches of a greengauge tree, some brambles stretching over from the neighbours’ garden.

On the way home that dude with the massive sideburns passes me going the other way.  I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen him on a bicycle before, but then I realize I’m getting him mixed up with the short man who wears what appears to be the uniform of a Scottish highland regiment, complete with cap and kilt, and marches up and down the same road murmurring to himself, and if you lean close enough to hear the murmurs you realise he’s only saying a string of obscenities over and over again.  So it’s quite possible I’ve seen the dude with the massive sideburns on a bicycle before.

The potted plant I brought upstairs to my new study has been bled of colour; a tired and pallid thing, it droops over the dresser, missing the sunlight it used to lean towards.  I keep meaning to move it.  And in the garden, the Man points at three new pots of herbs and says, “If you’re ever out here and stuck for something to do, I’ve been moving them into the sunlight during the day.”  The birthday bonsai tree, meanwhile, has not come out of its neglect-induced coma, leading me to believe that trees were never meant to be made in miniature.  Isn’t that the point of trees?  To dwarf you when you’re a child?  Yes, that’s the point of trees.  Forget life-giving; they’re simply meant to be large.  Sprawling.  Let them sprawl.

And with the students mostly gone, now, in this quiet time, even the pub has changed colours.  I’m finally seeing all the people we live so close to without knowing; we’ve crawled out of hiding, slouched down the street and converged in an ale-soaked hive.  More crazies, and more lovelies, than I ever thought possible.

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Saturdays in our house are a kind of homage to smug liberals everywhere.  The recent discovery of the East Oxford farmer’s market makes it worse.  It used to be Sundays, but the Observer just isn’t as good as the Saturday Guardian, and by lunchtime we’re sitting at the kitchen table reading columns out loud to each other while we eat our locally-grown vegetables and freshly baked bread.  It’s almost disgusting.  No; it is disgusting, but endearingly so, don’t you think?

One of my greatest Saturday pleasures is Tim Dowling, the front-of-magazine columnist who writes about…well, nothing, really, and writes it well.  These last few weeks his pieces have been rather lackluster , but I eat them up even so, and I always, always want to root for him, especially when he writes about googling himself (am I secretly hoping he might take the practice up again and find my blog?  Yes, maybe.  So what.) and discovers there are people out there who think he’s a twat. He is not, as far as I can tell, a twat.

And then, the other day, I had a revelation: part of the reason I’m so enamoured of Dowling (apart from envying his ability to turn the boring into the amusing) is that he’s American born.

I came to this revelation whilst watching the recent episode of Mock the Week with Tom Stade as a guest.  You need to know two things about this:

1. I had not previously heard of Tom Stade, and;
2. American accents and Canadian accents SOUND THE SAME TO ME*.  Maybe I should be more discerning, but I’m not.

So I heard Tom Stade speaking and I had this weird thought: aw, another American.  And every time he said something funny, I laughed louder than I did for Frankie Boyle and co., and every time he said something almost-funny-but-not-quite I laughed anyway, and then I realized that this is my own brand of patriotism, and I’m somewhat relieved to have found it.

My patriotism has been missing for awhile now.  I meet fellow Americans in bars and at dinner parties here, and sometimes they’ll say, but honestly, don’t you miss the US? And I’ll have to admit that what I miss most is not the beloved nation but my weird, lovable little family and the weird little ranch where I grew up.  They’ll name chain restaurants, routines and traditions, products you can’t get here, and I won’t feel that warm fuzzy feeling I probably should.

I thought I was weird.  But now I know: give me an American writer (/comedian/actor/radio host/etc) living (or at least performing) in the UK, and I’ll support him (or her) with the passion of a true patriot.

*Upon futher investigation, I learned that Tom Stade is Canadian, not American.  So before writing this post I double-checked that Dowling is, as I had always suspected, a fellow citizen.

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