This week has probably not been one of the finest of my entire existence. I promise this won’t be one of those whiny “everything’s gone to shit” posts, but I fell down the stairs at work yesterday. FELL DOWN THE STAIRS. Just saying.

I was reading the paper. I should have known not to do this, as once, when I was about six, I was reading a book whilst walking down the street with my Dad, when all the sudden a parking meter sprung from the earth and hit me in the face and I fell down, but it’s not an excuse anyway. I tripped over my own feet with about three stairs to go, and stopped my fall by hitting my head on the wall in front of me. I was so surprised by this that I couldn’t decide if I should cry or laugh or what, so I just gathered myself up and pressed a palm to the painful part of my head. After a little while it occurred to me that I was just standing on the landing with one hand clapped to my head, looking loony, and that maybe I should move, so I took my hand away from the bump and saw blood. Well, head wounds do that, I thought calmly, and I went upstairs to the staff toilet and splashed water on my face.

All well and good, but by the time I had got back down to the office again, it was bleeding again. I should mention that it wasn’t bleeding profusely, not by any means. More just…seeping. So when a co-worker asked idly if I’d hit my head, I said, yeah, I fell down the stairs, and giggled, and she said Oh my gosh, you mean right now? Because your head is bleeding.

Well, that was it. I could no longer pretend that my clumsiness was casual. Instead, I had to go across the road and get ice from the kitchen. Only they had no ice, so the chef brought me a plastic bag full of frozen corn. My boss wanted to bandage it to my head so that my arm wouldn’t get sore holding it there, but I drew the line at being an English patient lookalike. After a half hour of idleness I put a plaster over the cut and threw myself (metaphorically, not literally) back at my work.

I felt fine, and I wasn’t prepared to linger for long on the incident, especially not as it highlighted an example of stupendous ineptitude. But after ten thousand questions, expressions of sympathy, Natasha Richardson comparisons, and suggestions that I drink a little less at work (I don’t drink at all at work, in case you’re tempted to take that literally), I began to fret. It doesn’t take much to make me fret (I suffer, after all, from varying degrees of generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and hypochondria, which is a common but very unfortunate combination of ailments), and the internet, let me tell you, is the jackpot of fret-fuel.

So if you ever wanted to know what could possibly happen to you if you hit your head, causing your brain to strike your skull and begin bleeding, look it up online and then PANIC. By the time I got home to the Man, I was a proper wreck. “I don’t want to die because I fell down the stairs,” I sobbed at him, in his arms. He (and everyone else) had already asked me if I felt dizzy, nauseous, if I’d blacked out, if I had any symptoms whatsoever of a series injury, and the answer was no, I don’t think so, but the problem was of course that by that time I’d worked myself up so much that I did feel a bit dizzy just from the worry.

“Don’t worry,” he said to me, after I’d convinced him to help me look up head injuries online, after we’d ruled out together the possibility of concussion, “You’re going to be fine.” I decided to start blaming everyone else for my panic. “I wasn’t worried until everyone else started saying things,” I said, which was true, to an extent.

Having dramatized the event as much as possible, I decided it was finally time to settle down, take some Paracetemol, have some dinner, relax, and practice how I was going to tell this story to people in the days to come. I decided to acknowledge the fact that actually, I hadn’t hit my head that hard; that by now, the only sore part of me (besides my ego) was the bit of broken skin at my temple. I decided all this was easier, in fact, than working myself up into an epic panic.

My relaxation was aided by a solid hour spent reading passages from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, which sounds dull until you realize that they’re riddled with gems like this one: “‘That queer-looking man seems to like Dick,’ said Anne.”

***

And then I awoke the next day and in spite of a distinct tenderness near the wound, felt good, until my spirits were dampened by the din of the bills in the study, clamoring to be paid. I would pay you, I told them sternly as I tried to find an unoccupied slice of desk on which to put my tea and branflakes, if I could pay you, but you insist on being so large as to be unmanageable. In response, they just moaned some more, and huffed, and one or two even did a little angry jig atop my computer.

To ease my guilt and shut them up, I paid my half of the rent and my portion of the gas bill, which made me feel momentarily better, until I realized that I’m just about at the end of my coping-tether. The catalyst for this realization was the knowledge that I’d been wrongly charged £20 by a broken cashpoint in Fulham. For an instant I blamed Fulham (maybe the big smoke, knowing I’ve rejected it as a place to live, is somehow out to get me), but I couldn’t hide for long from the fact that I’m a postgraduate student living in a graduate’s world. I’m ignoring the credit crunch, the recession, the big scary black monster in the corner, whatever you want to call it, because my problems are deeper than that.

Here’s how it is: I reached a point today where I no longer understood how I could go on like this. It baffled me, this realization. I actually sat down on the couch and pondered it. Because I’ve never been happier, emotionally, fundamentally. I have someone to love, and who loves me, and we live in a beautiful city and do beautiful (if not very lucrative) things, and our life is both exciting to me and soothing, gentle. But here I was on a glorious March morning wondering how we were going to pay those loud bills in the study after all, how, indeed, I was going to pay for groceries and to have the heel stuck back onto my boot and to get my coat, now impossibly soiled, dry-cleaned, how I was going to buy laundry detergent, do all of the little things that require money.

It’s not that I don’t work, it’s that I don’t work enough–but I can’t work more, without sacrificing my masters degree (and, also, the legality of my visa–not to mention my sanity). In that bleak moment I couldn’t stop myself from wondering if my fall down the stairs was not symbolic in some way, if perhaps I am not only falling but also hitting a wall in my work, my career (my career? What career?), my financial well-being.

But then, this evening at university, a successful and well-respected novelist began his chat with us by recounting how just yesterday, he’d been walking down his street, head turned, distracted by the for-sale signs on a pair of houses, when suddenly he smacked into the side of a metal pole, and look at the mark on the side of my head, he said.

So real writers have those moments too. And anyway, the really annoying thing about not having any money isn’t not being able to pay the bills; it’s not being able to buy the Man a really super birthday present.

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On the way to work, sudden blossoms. They came overnight. First the delicate yellow flowers outside our front door, now, on the trees, a bloom of white. It’s warm enough to cycle in ballet flats, no socks–that’s a good warm, it’s all I’d ask of March. Yesterday, we ate lunch outside, in the garden.

With these sudden blossoms comes, too, a sudden remembrance of my love for the city. I hope this infusion of affection seeps into the work I’m doing on the book. The freeze of winter has made me cold about the project, not lacking in theoretical enthusiasm but lacking in the ability to translate thought into word. I’ve been drawn into myself like a creature curled in its own shell. I wouldn’t want to make this malady specific, wouldn’t want it to lose its poetry by pinpointing it preciesely, giving it a name, say, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Then again, perhaps it’s like the aquisition of a degree: Miranda Ward, GAD, SAD. (Or, indeed, like a Dr. Seuss rhyme).

But I don’t think it’s like this. I think what I feel in winter is a choice. I like to wrap myself in the cocoon of my own worries, like to hibernate in my study, fretting, picking at my own fingers, sighing, watching the naked trees, thinking that my projects are languishing, my ability shrinking. It makes the transition to Spring sweeter, makes me feel like, as soon as the blossoms come, I can shed my ugly countenance, wear something nicer for the Summer.

I wasn’t always like this. I’m a California girl, you see; not obsessed with seasons, not even aware of them except for the changes in light and the subtle shift of colour. I write this often, so it must be important to me. I write, often, too, of how my time in Boston made me aware of something I’d never known before, about my own reaction to the malleability of days, my own obsession with the weather. (The Man says that when I enthuse about temperature or sun or rain in the way that I can, sometimes, I become in that moment almost perfectly British.)

But still, here we are, at the edge. I’m hoping that the expanding sunlight makes the work, too, expand, so that it fills the days like blossoms and warmth. Punting weather, garden weather.

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A while ago, in the throes of some anxious moment or other, I told the Man that I wanted to stop taking my (low-grade) anti-anxiety medication, because (arbitrarily) I’d decided I’d been on it too long. And he asked me something that I had never, not once, asked myself, not in three years. That’s great, he said. What have you done to actually reduce the anxiety?

So I pretended to be all offended for a little bit, and then admitted, with some chagrin, that I hadn’t done anything. I’d started taking the medicine. It had worked. That was it.

“But I’m happier now than I was then,” I said.
“That’s not the point,” he said.

So today, as I was walking home from work, I tried to pinpoint precisely what anxiety feels like, to me. I had to get beyond the physical manifestations. I think I wanted a metaphor. I figured if I could understand something greater than the fact that worrying over something made me dizzy, my heart race, I could also understand something greater than the relationship between medicine and symptoms.

What I came up with is this: it feels like something is eating you. That is, it’s a bit like being in the belly of a beast, your thoughts held captive so that it’s the beast’s voice, not yours, in your head. That tingling in your toes is the nibbling of the great monster; the dizziness is the Alice-esque fall down the monster’s throat and the disorientation after, the doubt, that’s the dark cavern of a cruel belly.

Quite what this says about anything, I don’t know, except that maybe I shouldn’t try to overthink things, but there we are anyway.

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I was flipping through the Observer magazine yesterday when I came across this article, by Harriet Green, which begins with black, bold lettering: “Welcome to the era of anxiety”. It goes on: “Generalised anxiety disorder is the world’s biggest mental health problem. But do we really have anything to worry about?”

On the facing page, the author holds up a sign that indicates she is worried about the credit crunch, global warming, drinking too much, her sex life, the price of her house, and, of course, being worried.

I waved the magazine excitedly at The Man (who has, if you’ll notice, graduated from being The Boy as his beard has reached an epic stage and he could no more be mistaken for a boy as I could).

“Look!” I cried, pointing. “Who does this remind you of?”

We had a good giggle.

But, as Green points out, “I accept many of my concerns seem unserious. And in public I make light of them, happily casting myself as a kind of female Woody Allen. But when I’m at home those ridiculous concerns can take over.”

Mine took over in spring of 9th grade, when I suddenly and seemingly spontaneously lost the ability to sleep peacefully, something that up until that point I had had no trouble doing at all. My body shook, my head spun, and I lived in a sort of bubble of terror.

To confound matters, I had just acquired my first boyfriend (which is not a term, at the age of 14, that necessarily means the same as it does later, and in this case it meant someone to make out with in the library stacks and hold hands with between classes, more a social rite of passage than a romantic affiliation) and I remember thinking, as I lay awake at night wondering if I was ill or just an insomniac: I have to get to sleep. I can’t be sick. If I don’t get to go to school tomorrow, I don’t get to see him.

To be in darkness was unbearable; I left the light on all night (almost a sin in our solar-powered house) and sometimes, when I thought I could hear the silence crawling into my ears and playing in my head, I put a CD into the boombox and listened to celtic guitar, or medieval chanting, at a volume just quiet enough to not float through the floor and into my parent’s bedroom. I was just old enough to recognize the shame in waking them for such a trivial matter, but just young enough, too, to wish that I could.

This was when I discovered that nights are twice as long as days, and a thousand times as lonely. By dawn I would drift into a state of half-sleep, and the singing of the alarm clock an hour later sounded like relief to my soul.

To comfort me, my father told me that when he was little and trying to get to sleep, he used to get the feeling that the corners of the room where forever receding; but by nighttime I felt alone again. I didn’t try to make a connection with my mother’s famous highway panic-attack, which crippled her driving confidence for years (only recently has she begun making the trek down to Orange County again on her own), or the stresses (mostly social) of my first year in high school.

Instead, I sought rescue in routine, and a host of obsessive-compulsive activities. I started sucking on “Moonlight Mints,” homeopathic, supposedly-sleep-inducing sweets my mother had picked up in an airport at some point, each evening, trying to convince myself that they were in some small way making me weary.

If the sleeplessness passed, the worry certainly never did. Five fretful years later, I found myself in a doctor’s office. I had passed from innocently anxious to severely obsessive-compulsive and back again. On the eve before I started a new job, I awoke with a jolt to all my old symptoms: the walls of my room seemed to be receding before my very eyes, I couldn’t be sure if I was nauseous or not, my heart beat fast. I went upstairs (I was staying the summer in my parents’ house) to the living room and flopped down on the couch. I fell asleep re-reading the same dull passage in Cosmopolitan about how to make your guy lust for you even more, but all summer long I battled with sleeplessness and shakiness, until one panicky evening, my father suggested that I might be suffering from an anxiety disorder.

“What?” I said.
“You know, panic attacks, that sort of thing,” he said. “Look it up.”
I went online. I couldn’t believe this had never occurred to me before. Every single one of my symptoms was named as an indication of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I felt instantly, physically better just knowing this.

I told the doctor that it wasn’t the worry, so much, but the physical symptoms, that I needed help with. I wanted some kind of reassurance that this was normal:

“I’m just amazed at how physical the manifestations are,” I told him. He was a physician’s assistant I had never seen before, our family doctor being on holiday, and he looked at me kindly.
“There’s no need to be embarrassed about it,” he said. “It happens to a lot of people.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to decide if this made me feel better or worse. I wanted to tell him about the way the room spun, the way my stomach churned and my heart raced how I shivered even in the heat of a California summer, but part of me worried (yes, worried) that he would tell me how unnatural this was. It had certainly not occurred to me, however, to be embarrassed about it.
“Sure,” he went on soothingly. “It even happened to me, when I was going through a really stressful time. You are talking about loose stool, aren’t you?”
I wanted to laugh with relief.
“No,” I said.
“Ah,” he murmured. And I fancy that, despite his advice to me, he was slightly embarrassed now.

He gave me some pills, which I took home and promptly stashed away. I was genuinely afraid to take them. I read the possible side effects (always a mistake). I flipped through my copy of Overcoming Anxiety for Dummies so often that the pages started to look tired, trying to convince myself that what the doctor had prescribed me would help. Finally, egged on my parents, who I think were growing weary of having a 19-year-old worry-wort wandering the corridors at night, I swallowed the first pill. I awoke in a panic several hours later.

“Um, I think I’m having a bad reaction to the pills,” I told my parents, holding out my hand to show that it was trembling.
“I think,” my father suggested delicately (bless him), “that you might just be worrying about them.”

A few weeks later I wondered why I had made such a big deal of it.

But Harriet Green adds another perspective to her article, which I take to heart because, well, it’s really aimed at people my age: “we are entering a new age of anxiety. As the economic situation worsens, so fretting in the general population rises. In the past year, oil prices have risen by 50%, basic foods such as rice have soared by as much as 70% and house prices are plummeting at a faster rate than we’ve seen in a long time. Those in the know are starting to whisper that we’re heading for the
mother of all recessions.” Or, as Merryn Somerset Webb, editor of MoneyWeek, so comfortingly puts it: “People are anxious, and they are right to be…People under 40 are not used to losing jobs or being made redundant.”

In other words: this is a hell of a time to be a newly-indoctrinated adult. Adulthood, I’ve recently learned, is hard enough (who knew that paying your own rent could be so painful?—let alone paying for, say, a second degree from, say, a foreign university?). But being told that in the current climate, we’re right to be anxious adds another layer to it entirely. A new age of anxiety? But I thought I’d already had my age(s) of anxiety.

So I’m starting to think that what remains to be done is follow the advice of Tom Hodgkinson (editor of The Idler, who, if you’ll remember, was partly responsible for the pig-roast in a London traffic island): “Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food—the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away,” Hodgkinson is quoted as saying in Green’s article; he “encourages us to take matters into our own hands and simply shed the burden.”

Yesterday, we went and pulled up all our potatoes and had a gorgeous Sunday roast, complete with chilled rosé and a peach-and-shortbread pudding. Of all the places I’ve lived (and, granted, there haven’t been so very many), England has perfected the art of the Sunday: shops close early still, and the most famous tradition (apart from churchgoing, which frankly I can take or leave) is centered around eating, and, in our young lives, good friends. I know I’ll always have a battle with anxiety—and maybe it’ll be a bigger battle because of the environmental and economic climate, I don’t know. But I do know it’ll be an easier battle with things like long, lazy sunday lunches to look forward to.

“Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy.”
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

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