On the journey up all sorts of stuff was popping into my head ..several blogs worth in fact...now I can't recall any of it. Maybe I should try the dictation app on the phone. Coming up with a coherent set of words to describe my feelings on nights such as this is a thankless task...nothing will cohere without fairly stressful effort...which sort of defeats the purpose of blogging in order to relieve the pent up stress. Little snippets of memory and vague flashes of hopefulness coexist with the somewhat angst ridden landscape that passes for my mind currently. Then there is the bone numbing, will sapping anxiety that tunnels through the most carefully assembled defences, probing ever corner of my mind and tugging at every fibre of my being. There is no escape from its touch...no way of shielding the thought processes from its constant ingress. You can do as many thought exercises as you want...once anxiety has a grip it is relentless in its progress and ruthless in its application. I am not helping of course by attributing characteristics to it...bigging it up so to speak. But that's how it feels.
I had a friend once plagued with anxiety and a lot of people used to tell her that she had nothing to be anxious about....she was comfortably off, happily married, had a fulfilling job etc...but of course they missed the point. Her anxiety was real to her and extolling the virtues of the wonderful life she had served only to make her feel even more isolated...and more anxious. She had deep abandonment issues that I won't go into which rendered all talk of how fortunate she was to have loving husband/family etc pretty much irrelevant. She still struggles with it but with medication has improved. I say all that only to highlight how serious a problem anxiety can be irrespective of people's outward circumstances. There does not always have to be an obvious or specific reason. My own anxiety issues stem from both the general and the specific. The latter is the simplest to explain in that it is quite common these days. The shop is struggling and under constant severe financial pressure. If it continues like this I don't know how it will survive. Needless to say that is a concern. Dealing with the pressure of that day to day is like being in a vice that just keeps tightening. Keeping a lid on it when dealing with customers is next to impossible and requires great concentration. This in turn breeds more stress. I am not alone of course as a small business owner but that doesn't help. So that is the obvious one...the one that looms largest in my mind this evening.
Then there is the other type. It's much harder to pin down and of course the financial/business pressures bleed into it to an extent. It comes from somewhere deep and is less amenable to reasoned analysis. It's like an undercurrent...flowing beneath and around everything else, releasing its poison as it goes. I suspect I know where it comes from but I am not willing to go there. Some things are too painful for a sunny evening in Newcastle. Or anywhere else. It's roots no doubt are in childhood where all roots terminate....or should that be begin...they are in my DNA perhaps...my code...it found nourishment in the wreckage of a failed marriage...and before that in the fractured relationship that lead there...we all have our code as Andy Kirkpatrick so eloquently laid bare in a recent blog. The code that makes us up that is. Not the code we live by. Mine is written across a tinder box of need, frustration and self loathing ...I am greater than the sum of its parts and yet I am limited by each in turn. Anxiety gets to have a field day in such company.
There's quite a chill in the air as I walk back to the car. That's somehow fitting.
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