I released my first song officially last Friday, a huge moment personally and naturally came with a fair bit of anxiety.
The song went live while I was sitting alone trying to record some new music.
Not an ideal moment given the inevitable hiccups that come with anything you’re attempting for the first time.
Having had little luck getting useful answers from a cursory google search, I messaged a few friends who have some experience in this field.
Alas, they were busy, but the messages appeared as read. Typically this would be merely one of the vague irritations of our impatient internet culture, but to an anxious mind, alone on a big day…
Tears of abandonment began to flood so heavy that the salt stung my cheeks and I found myself fighting for breath between sobs, crying as pathetically as a distraught child.
“Why wheeze am wheeze I wheeze alone?”
Ten minutes or an hour or whatever time it actually was later with still no reply, I climbed deeper into the anxiety attack and vented my despair by bruising my right hand to the point of swelling against bricks and mortar, like any healthy adult is want to do.
I’m usually much better at regulating this type of anxiety, and can catch the early warning signs enough to rationalise the situation before it gets that bad. On occasion one can slip through though, as the current batch of bruises can attest.
Now that’s a pretty intense way to start this piece and I have good reason for it, though you can wait for the end for an explanation.
I have more tales to tell. So let us begin with something pubescent:
My teenage years were pretty much one long anxiety attack.
Towards the end of secondary school I had more or less given up attending in favour of any available means of hiding.
I would wake every morning crying and shaking and rush straight to the bathroom to violently puke up the contents of my pre breakfast guts before I was even ready to piss away my morning wood. Dressing in the officially mandated removal of personality and independent thought and the ugly green tie it came with, I’d stuff my thoroughly doodled school books in my wardrobe and pack my back with a change of clothes. After detouring past the bus stop I’d wander into the woods and find a spot to rid myself of the insipid school uniform.
The day would be spent walking, listening to music on a minidisc player and practicing kickboxing, without contact with any other human. Then reverse the process in time to go home and hide in my room with my guitars and still have minimal human interaction. I maintained this as a near daily routine for over a year. What else was I going to do with my time? GCSE’s? Bollocks to that.
The years after school we’re a little better. I had a few friends that bmx’d and skateboarded that I’d known since early childhood. Socialising was becoming possible, if exhausting and awkward. So bikes and skateboards were my new thing. No learning would take place with more than one person present, but I got better at being around people even if I never got any good at the sports. Girls remained a problem though, I was utterly useless.
18 years old, going to parties and nightclubs (the two most anxiety inducing environments possible) and nursing my mortal terror with obscene quantities of alcohol, I could endure or even enjoy a few hours.
Anxiety made my alcoholic “prowess” something that was beginning to gain a reputation. The sheer volume of adrenaline in my bloodstream had a similar effect to the white lines so many of the others were snorting off toilet seats. So I’d maintain the ability to walk and talk in spite of the almost stomach pump worthy binge drinking sessions. Though these days I’d likely puke after the third pint.
Contrary to popular belief, no amount of dutch courage will cure anxiety, it will simply make you too numb to notice it. It’s still there, and you’re still afraid and panicky. With little to no inhibitions this is a dangerous state of mind.
From nasty brawls, to being thrown out of wetherspoons for dancing on a table and attempting to strip, I have many absurd moments to choose from for this piece but the most emotional moment is probably one of the smallest. Just a brief moment of embarrassment of the kind you’d find in an early blink 182 song, that to this day makes me cringe so hard I could break my teeth.
All I did was lose my friend while getting my round in, and get distracted by a stunning young lady. “Now or never” I told myself. I walked up, peacock feathers ready to flutter, and froze. Full eye contact, motionless, for far too long.
“What?” Was all she said. Completely baffled by my own actions or lack of, and her mildly irritated reaction, I simply maintained the unblinking eye contact, necked both pints of beer, turned on my heel and marched away with sergeant like rigidity.
Such a tiny moment of shame, but it brings me to tears of laughter and spine cracking cringes at the same time. I can picture that woman using me as an obvious example of how weird and unpleasant men in bars are.
Fast forward about seven years or so, I didn’t have a full drivers license and used a little 125cc motorbike to get around. Parked up outside my house with a flat tyre, some utter bell end yocal from the squalid little dump town I live in thought stealing it would be tremendous fun. He wrecked it, and I sincerely hope he was badly hurt. Calling the insurance company provided me with an unexpected challenge. Probably the most severe attack of my life.
Staring at the paperwork and the phone, ready to dial the number and recite the policy number, I froze once again. I forgot how to read. The letters and numbers on the page were as clear as day but my mind had reverted to the state of a pre schooler. Knowing the alphabet but without a clue how to actually use it. Just a random mess of letters, even my own name was unrecognisable to me.
There’s so many other, much more severe or tragic or traumatic moments. Moments where I could have died, moments that I wake up in tears with my heart racing having just relived them in a photorealistic nightmare. Nights I have scars from, both physical and psychological.
I chose these moments to write about specifically because it’s humiliating and it’s funny in places, and because they are mundane. Which anxiety often is. My intention is that by being able to laugh at my own emotional damage in a public format, perhaps I can inspire someone else to turn one of their horrible moments into a big joke or an intriguing story, or to realise that those lonely, boring and isolated moments are as important as any crazy drunken adventures.
Once you can do that, it’s yours to own and it can’t hurt you anymore, at least that seems to be the theory Chuck Palahniuk has based his writing career on, and that’s good enough for me.
Now onwards to try to find the humour in my much darker moments and own them too.
Alex Has A Story 