24

I lay awake, following the whirlpool of thoughts deeper into my self-consciousness.

At first, it was trepidation about the anxiousness exploding into a panic attack. I existed on this brink that represented this horrible danger. Beyond it, I didn’t know what else there was. Madness, maybe. Or that’s what I thought when I was younger and naïve.

Then it was worrying about possible health issues. Like that small lump that appeared on my hip following a game of tennis when I was just sixteen. Cancer, maybe? That was a weekend of worry, until my GP told me it was some fatty deposit.

There were other things that cropped up. Like, when I was nineteen, the OCD intrusive thought that I would lose touch with reality. Only I didn’t know it was OCD. That was a constant battle to prove I did know who I was, reciting a mantra over and over and over, although it also occurred to me if I lost touch with reality, I’d no longer know the difference between it and fantasy.

After I became agoraphobic at twenty-five, it was a fixation on breath – on how shallow and fast it grew. Leaving the house triggered the countdown. Then it was a race to accomplish whatever I was doing before it escalated to the point that I hyperventilated myself into fainting. I never did. But it was possible.

When I ditched Aropax at thirty-five, I barely slept for a fortnight and reconnected with the rawness of my mind, with emotions that were overreacting to stimuli, until I was sure what was re-emerging wasn’t the old me, but something from a well that had been newly tapped.

Through my digestive issues when I was forty, I’d lay awake at night, squirming, as pain twisted up my stomach. It felt like rats were trying to eat their way out. Emergency. Surely, that was the only recourse. I needed to get checked out. But I’d just lay there, contending with the fear.

My GP kept assuring me that, physically, everything was fine. But the pain was unrelenting, running over the course of months. Doctors could be wrong. Tests could miss things. Shit happens.

Throughout, that self-awareness didn’t just revolve around things going on inside my head, or my body. Sometimes, it would attach to something I might’ve said or done – a quip that didn’t elicit a laugh, or a joke that was (in retrospect) thoughtless. I would cringe at the memory. Cringe and cringe and cringe until I wanted to punch a wall, like I could smash the cringe out of existence.

That escalated into something different entirely: a self-consciousness about how I sat, or how I stood, when talking to somebody; how I smiled, what I said, or how I projected my voice.

I would watch videos of myself from work, mindful of the inflections in my voice, my pose, how I sat, how I moved, how I navigated the world and what people might infer from it.

Any action taken always faced a scathing scrutiny, a constant examination that would contextualize its worth then judge how and where it sat with me. Could it be dismissed? Or would it be hyper-analyzed?

Then there was the projection about the future – not necessarily the big things, like work, relationships, and finances, but little everyday things. Would I say the wrong thing at the wrong time? Or I could visualize being hurt in an accident, like falling down stairs. These scenarios lived (and live) constantly in my head, like my mind’s tapping into some alternate dimension where I can glimpse these things happening before me.

Everybody thinks throughout the day. Everybody considers what they’re doing. Everybody makes choices.

And then they act.

There’s usually nothing more attached – at least no reflection, no evaluation, and certainly no self-condemnation.

We then traipse around in the world, interacting with others and our environment.

But over forty years of anxiety, of manic thinking, and that self-reflection has become hyper-analytical until it’s almost my externalization that’s ignored, and my world has become an internalization that’s mining deeper, deeper, and deeper.

I wonder, sometimes, just how far I can delve before I hit something I’m not meant to, like digging in the yard only to strike plumbing, sewage gushing up like I’d discovered oil.

What happens then?

What comes next?