Those heroes… they have it easy.

When I was a child, I used to make dens by hanging blankets off the top bunk, crawling into the quiet space created and looking at the world through the weave of the fabric.

I spent half of my life in books, and when I played with my friends I used to create fantasy worlds with them, worlds in which we had special powers and could save the planet, on the grass outside our houses every day by teatime.

I wrote countless stories, I played the themes out with my Star Wars figures.

When I was a teenager, I became obsessed with science fiction, with Star Trek (Next Generation of course) and Back to the Future.

All different, yet all doing exactly the same thing. They were all safe places, places to run away and hide in, nooks and crannies in fantastical worlds.

Today, I’ve come here to hide. This page is that blanket that I am pulling down to make a quiet safe space. I’m terrified you see. My chest is tight, tears are but a lump in the throat away and I want to run from my house, leap in the car and drive to a land where all I need to do is write and not earn a penny.

I am in the grip of anxiety. I mentioned this before when I wondered what to write about, and today I am being crushed in its giant claws, like one of Sinbad’s poor men, plucked from the valley floor by the giant Roc.

I have been very ill, as you know, and this is the third week of the illness. I am trying to work, to chip away at the mountain that has gathered whilst I’ve been coughing up my lungs and shivering and aching. But I am still not back to full fitness, and this doesn’t sit well with me. I am an on or off person. I do something with complete concentration and put everything into it, and if I am incapable of that, I get stressed. Anxious. Stomach wrenchingly tense.

Right now there are so many things waiting for my attention, and the thought of it all is turning my knees to water. I want to be like a hero in the thousands of stories that are woven under my skin. Brave, persevering despite the odds, striving ever onwards. But I am a weak shell of a woman, just a sad excuse of a human being that hides behind stories and characters because real life is just too damn hard.

And I am angry with these stories right now. Because I suspect, rather bitterly, that it’s easy for these heroes to travel those lands, to fight those monsters, to hunt down the villains or escape their clutches. Why? Because all of those foes and challenges are outside of themselves.

It’s the silent demons that are impossible to fight. And these stories never talk about how the hero is frightened to get out of bed and face the day because of a nebulous sense of utter dread. They don’t focus on the woman who is too scared to check her email because of an imagined something or other in there.

Oh for heavens sake even as I write this, I am shooting it down! No, my inner optimist cries, they do face inner demons! They have to be brave, they face down fear at every turn, or else they wouldn’t be the heroes.

Well, I say back to that: bunches of arse. I’m sorry I can’t be more eloquent in my rebuttal, but I am pretty confident that if something hugely terrifying happened, I’d deal with it. What I can’t deal with are the shadowy, silent fears that slink in the back corners of my psyche and whisper to me all the time. The ones that tell me that all of my clients are angry and hate me for having flu and are going to sack me, even though I’ve kept them informed. The ones that gloat over every single tiny mistake I have ever made, and tarnish any success with a brief sarcastic, corrosive cough that withers anything I do into something barely acceptable.

I am fighting myself! And I can’t do this anymore! And I am using far too many exclamation marks and sounding like a raving loon!

But seriously, the amount of energy I expend on empty fears every day is immense. Sometimes I can’t switch my mobile phone on for fear that there is a scary message on there. When the phone rings I immediately assume it’s something bad. It’s pathetic!

Oh I can tell you about all the reasons why I have become like this. I can intellectually unpick the childhood that created this sorry state of adulthood, I can point to all of the psychological dead rats that are rotting away inside and leeching this thought poison into me every day, but you know what? That does no good.

I have spent years trying to untangle this knot. And where am I now? On my sofa, under a blanket, with a hacking cough, an aching chest and a heart rate more appropriate for one of the characters in my book, when running from a group of hunters with sharp eyes and even sharper arrows.

I wonder what I would be like without this fear? Who would I be? Sometimes I can muster myself into going out there and sparkling. I get caught up in other people and other things and I forget my fear and lo and behold, I have a fabulous time and great opportunities appear as if by magic. I get out of my own way. But so much of the time I am seized by such self doubt that I can’t fight my way out of the bindings it wraps around me. On a good day I can persevere, on a bad day I shake and weep and bemoan my weakness.

I suspect that the only difference between me and a lot of the people I look up to and want to be is confidence. They are putting themselves out there. I managed to battle my way to getting a publisher for Twenty Years Later, it took years to get there. I’m tired.

Yes, I am recovering from flu, and sleep deprived from the night time coughing and it’s natural to feel overwhelmed, especially when you run your own business and are responsible for paying the mortgage. But you know what, before this I was just as scared, just as paralysed. I am tired of wasting so much of myself on managing this constant anxiety. What would I be without it?

Powerful.

Successful.

Free.

I believe that all of our behaviours serve the instinct for self-protection, for survival, and that sometimes these defence mechanisms and survival tactics just get things a bit wrong. Something inside me is terrified of being out in the world, of reaching my potential, and so it fights the parts of me that strive to succeed with the weapons of generalised anxiety, false beliefs and a realistic feeling of something terrible being about to happen. And it’s far too good at it.

I’d just like to tell that part that its services are no longer required; it’s doing its job too well and it is hurting me more than helping.

Tell me I’m not alone in feeling this. You guys get scared sometimes, right? I wonder if we should all ask ourselves what we’d be if the only fear we ever felt was proportionate to our lives, instead of blown up into something crippling. I want to save my fear for reacting to zombie attacks and needing to protect my family please. Not being scared of what I could possibly be in the world.

Tagged as: anxiety, zombie attacks