a long time after that, but before now

“What are you thinking? What are you thinking when you begin to feel anxious?”
“Nothing.”
“No, but you are thinking something, and that’s what starts you feeling anxious. We can break it down.”
…
“Well, I guess I’m thinking ‘Oh no, not again’ and then I start thinking about what I can can do to cover it up, or how I can suppress it, or get out of the situation.”
She is excited (she’s a very enthusiastic person, or at least is making a concerted effort to be one) and she goes over to the whiteboard and starts diagramming it out, writing down thoughts and drawing arrows between them, looping each one back to the thought before, back to the beginning.

Except that the first thought is not the beginning. Anxiety is not a thought. It’s a nothing, a black hole/black blob with no words in it. My mind is not blank but anxiety is not made of words.

Her diagram should have a hole at the top, a gap. Where all the arrows go.

This clatter of thoughts, it happens a moment afterwards, and continues until I am safe (safe from nothing except my own anxiety: I am far from unaware of this). It is not the anxiety, but a reaction to the anxiety. My attempt to manage it, to keep it contained, away from other people, to avoid doing them harm. This would be obvious to her if she wanted it to be.

For her sake, I pretend things are getting better: I bring her stories of improvement every week. To tell her otherwise, to tell her that things are standing still, the black blob/black scribble untouched, would shame us both. CBT promises rapid results, so I do not have to do this for many weeks.

When I was very young, I used to imagine that the soul was a physical organ, embedded (of course!) in the foot. I saw it as a discrete wiry tangled bundle, like a steelo-pad, only black, and somehow of the nature of an inflamed tonsil. The anxiety is like this, but rather than being embedded in my instep, it floats freely before me. My heart is written over in a dense scribble that blocks out meaning, and cuts in. hurts.

“How do you know that other people notice?”
My answer is a mumble because of course I have held things back, I will not tell her all of my shame, or tell you.
“Where’s your proof? Can you prove other people notice? And even if other people notice, can you prove that they mind? Their reaction could be anything. They could be worried about you, or wondering what’s going on.”

They are standing outside on the driveway when I come home. My neighbours. They have been having a barbecue and are happy, relaxed. I see them from 50 metres down the road, but there is nothing I can do about it. I will not be able to speak to them or look at them today. I try to get past as quickly as I can.
“Yeah, what you say is ‘hello’!”, the youngest girl says.
“It’s as if she’s been struck dumb!”
In my suffering I am triumphant.
“There’s your proof!”, I would tell my counsellor, "I got your proof right here" . If I still had counselling. If I hadn’t been cured.

I lie on the bed, feeling anxiety in all my limbs, anxiety burning my skin. If I feel a sensation in any part of my body, I picture doing something terrible to that body part. If I feel a twitch in my left eyelid, I have a vivid picture of myself driving a screwdriver into that eye. If I move my left arm, I see myself smashing it with the hammer I know is in the garage. I know I will not do this. I do not move.
This only happens once.
It is the only time anxiety reaches me when I am alone.
It is the reason why I start seeing the cousellor.

ken.ichi

i had his parents' phone number and luckily he was still living there, so i could arrange to meet up with him: i hadn't been back to nagasaki for a couple of years, so my hopes weren't particularly high. and then when i met him, well, obviously i wished i hadn't. he was looking strangely bloated and his hair was gelled and swept back into something that wasn't a quiff, just a kind of salaryman bulge. his face was sallow and almost masked with a kind of brown discolouration. like a stain. i tried to make some sort of conversation, but i kept wondering if i had just imagined that he was a friend, that we could talk. we had decided to go to panic paradise and it was pretty much as it had always been.

i was desperately trying to keep the conversation going, but it was feeling like work, like my work, conversation whoring. he made me smile once, when i said he looked different and he said "well, you know, don't trust anyone over thirty". i wouldn't have smiled if english had been his first language, or if he'd been any good at it. actually, i smiled because he smiled.

then i asked some kind of "what else have you been doing lately?" question (really, you can't have been doing nothing all this time? just living with your parents and working part-time restaurant jobs and arguing with chefs?). and he said "oh, i wrote a novel"
"what about?"
"you. you and me."
"uh, in the style of haruki murakami?" (i knew he loved murakami)
"no. raymond chandler. raymond chandler and smis"
"smis?"
"you know, smis. morrissey"
"oooooh, THE smiths"
"yes"

i would say i was naive but obviously the truth is that i was vain and self-absorbed. i still am, to a fairly great extent. i should have taken it as a warning. instead, i smiled and left feeling like the evening had been worthwhile, like i'd ticked something off my list of Things To Do With My Life. i was 27, but a dumb 27. should have never spoken to him again. i would now.

i'm still a little glad someone wrote a book about me.

in the style of raymond chandler and the smiths.

it was rejected by 30 publishers, more or less.

all work is the same as other work

it's not that what i am doing now is the best thing in the world that i could be doing, but i have done worse. or, having done worse, i have recieved promotions to things i thought would be better. knowing the way things go, you do not need to be told that they were not better or even good.

i once worked in an office above the smog-line in osaka. the smog blocked out the hills entirely, leaving the suggestion that the post-apocalyptic jumble of gray, sooty buildings against a gray sooty sky continued indefinitely. i was working for a giant, many-tentacled company with a controlling interest in the english teaching/conversation whoring industry. the workers were divided, star-bellied-sneech style into blue-tags and yellow-tags. those with blue lanyards on their security passes were the permanent employees, those with the yellow lanyards were contractee scum. alternatively, a yellow tag meant they didn't own you, they were only renting.

the purpose of blue-tags was to attend meetings. the purpose of yellow-tags was to process the blue-tags meeting-produce into activities to be taught to all children in a certain age-group throughout japan in the same week. at one meeting the blue-tags decided that all 3-5 year-olds in japan would be taught the following conversational snippet in the third week of march:

Instructor: "A pig has one head. How many heads does a pig have?"

Students (all): "A pig has one head."


there was also a song (sung to the tune of oh my darling clementine):

Instructor and Students (all): "A pig has one head. A pig has one head. How many heads does a pig have? A pig has one head. A pig has one head. How many heads does a pig have?"

i like to think that the last line leaves the matter open to question.