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chapter-9

closer

We’re all getting more anxious, not less. You’re not imagining it. In Australia, anxiety related problems have increased from 3.8 per cent of the total population in 2011–12 to 11.2 per cent in 2014–15.

The figures are similar for the rest of the Western world. The most comprehensive research on this phenomenon, conducted at the San Diego State University, found that anxiety has increased steadily over the past eighty years, but concludes ‘no one knows why’.

Here’s my (possibly) contentious idea: It’s because we’re going in the wrong direction. We’re grasping outwards for satisfaction, sense of purpose, and for a solution to our unease. When we really need to be going inwards, where the comfort lies. Wrong way! Go back!

46.

Every man rushes elsewhere into the future because no man has arrived at himself.

— Michel de Montaigne

In his middle years, Renaissance man and self-confessed neurotic Michel de Montaigne set himself up in an isolated tower in the French countryside with the express aim of finding peace and writing life-changing essays. But sitting down to his writing desk each morning his head ran wild, lurching out for external salves to the anxiety that churned at his core. Sure, he was no longer frolicking around the world as he’d once done. But he still fled from himself daily. It drove him bonkers – he couldn’t settle, he was flighty – and much of his writing was dedicated to this torturous reaching outwards to distractions, and to the future, as he put it. All of which resembles my own attempts to find salvation in an army shed in a forest. And Thoreau’s (in a log hut near Walden Pond), and Bill Gates’ (in a cabin where he has ‘think weeks’ on his own, away from humans and technology) and Elizabeth Gilbert’s (in Italy, India and Bali).

But ironically – or perhaps perfectly – it was by sitting in, and writing about, the messiness of it all that Montaigne found his way to peace, as well as notoriety as a writer of life-­changing essays. As he wised up to this idea, he shared through his writing that freedom from the restlessness in our beings could only be achieved by actively resisting the pull outwards and into the future, and instead learning to ‘stay at home’.

Home, in case Montaigne and I haven’t spelled it out well enough yet, being ourselves. Our selves that sit on that little wooden bench, waiting for us to join them. Always.

It’s right now as I’m going through an anxious spell that the fullness of this realisation has fully occurred to me. That is, right now as I’m writing I’m viscerally absorbing the notion of coming in close, as opposed to merely processing someone else’s words on the matter.

I’ve had to accept these anxious spells while writing this book. I mean, what could bring on anxiety more than a deadline on a book that requires doing the one thing ­guaranteed to trigger anxiety – sitting in, rather than fleeing, the niggling in your guts?

It’s some time not long before dawn and I’m crouched on the dining room floor naked, embracing the inappropriateness of my situation. I’m renting out a stranger’s holiday home on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. It’s a pink wooden cottage in the trees a steep climb up rocks from the ocean where I swim the length of the beach most mornings. The house is filled with another family’s bunk beds and shell art and faux pineapples on the mantelpiece. I’ve been living temporarily, tentatively like this, in other people’s spaces for five years now. I operate from one – sometimes two – suitcases of belongings. It somehow seems appropriate that I stay in this flighty space, with no ‘home’ as such, while I write a book on the subject.

I’ve written a lot about anxiety over the years. I’ve answered lots of questions from strangers and friends of friends, and from myself. I now know that my anxiety doesn’t have to be caused by anything particularly fear-inducing. At least not to the normal eye. After more than three decades of it coursing through my veins, anxiety is sometimes simply in my bones.

Yep, anxiety can just be in your bones. No reason required.

Indeed it is tonight. It’s been there for a week or so. Nothing in particular has brought it on. It’s just there. It might have been one coffee too many this week. It might be a hormonal surge. It might be the moon, the wind, Mercury doing that retrograde thing. Who knows? And does it really matter? Right now I just have to ride it out. And watch it dispassionately. I know better now than to fret about where it might have come from. Otherwise I’d be getting more anxious about being anxious, or about thinking I shouldn’t be anxious. Sometimes I just am. Anxious. Full-stop.

Tonight, trying to sleep, parts of my head are relaxed and my body is crying out to sink and surrender. I’ve not slept for six nights straight. I’ve taken a Valium. S’alright, s’alright. You really have to do what you have to do sometimes. Sleep becomes too important. When you have anxiety, you do learn to give up on all the perfectly Instagrammable notions of how life should be done. You just have to attend to survival sometimes.

I’m dopey from the drugs, but there’s a deeper part of my viscera that surges forward, urgently, relentlessly. The foot is clamped on the accelerator even if the driver is dozing at the wheel.

Flooding through my head, through the Valium haze, are thoughts about the emails that I need to send in the morning. I come up with an opening line for my next chapter. I map out my route to work tomorrow. I come up with an idea for a friend’s business, and the logo. And I work out the signifi­cance of one of Adele’s lyrics. These thoughts happen all at once in an explosion outwards.

And it’s now, as I chat to you, dear friends, from my squat position, that I fully – as in fulsomely – realise that this surging, grasping forward, ‘out there’ and into the future is a really integral part of the anxious experience. It’s there, always, being fuelled by our anxiety.

It’s difficult when you’re in your anxiety to pause long enough to observe this. But tonight I try to stay put and watch it. And I see quite clearly that when I’m anxious all my rushing, competing, frenzied thoughts are either a) plans or b) contingencies for what could happen. It’s like I’m running from the me that exists right now. This me, as I currently am, is not good enough. A good life and the ‘right’ me and the answers I seek are ahead in the future … and I rush like buggery to get there. Ironically – oh, yes, once again, and cruel to be sure – the rushing, as well as the inevitable, vast and ungrounded unknown of what’s ahead, makes me anxious. Which makes me rush ahead even more (to get away from the anxious, uncomfortable feeling I have). And so … — cruel irony 5

We rush to escape what makes us anxious, which makes us anxious, and so we rush some more.

And on and on we go. It’s mad when you think about it. But sometimes it’s just in our bones.

Sigh.

(The funny thing … as I watched this happen in myself in real time, the surge forward backed off. And I fell asleep shortly after.) 47.

Thinkers from Darwin to Freud describe anxiety as a grasping forward to fixes that make us feel safer about the unknown ahead of us. I read somewhere that Charles Darwin observed that due to their inability to conceptualise the future, animals don’t get anxious, at least not in the same way we do. Sure, frogs and ostriches experience fight or flight responses like us. But their trigger is plain and simple fear in that moment and this fear is proportionate to the tangible threat involved. (Plus, of course, they’re not aware they’re fearful or anxious as such, and so whatever fear or anxiety they have stops at the initial trigger.) Human anxiety, on the other hand, stems from an existential awareness of what that fear means – ultimately our future annihilation. Indeed since Kierkegaard (in the 1840s), the existentialists have sought to explain this particular human anxiety as the dread we feel when we realise life is finite. When this strikes us, things can look different – we’re aware of the lack of meaning to our lives (we breed, then we die, the end), the infinite choice and freedom we have (given we, as individuals, are not that important) and other vast factors that seem pointless in the face of our inevitable death. Fear is a primal physical response; anxiety is both this fear and an awareness of the fear and what it means.

Me, I can feel this future-grasping in my body. When I’m anxious, I often do my neck in. It’s from straining forward with my head, rigid and forced. And I have accidents that injure my right leg. I plunge desperately forward with this dominant leg (in Eastern and esoteric traditions, the right side of the body is said to signify our forceful masculine side). I’ve subsequently broken my right ankle, torn my ligaments on my right ankle, split open my right knee four times, requiring stitching back the already strained flesh four times over, and I’ve developed arthritis in my right hip.

(A BRACKETED NOTE ON DEPRESSION)

If anxiety surges forward, depression is a clinging to the past. Depression is mired in regrets, remorse and obsessing over what should have been. When I was depressed briefly in my late teens I would repeat l’esprit d’escalier moments in my head. I replayed conversations over and over, grasping backwards to avoid the niggling in my gut.

Now I repeat imaginary scenarios that are yet to happen.

Lao Tzu is wrongly attributed with an oft-cited insight (the idea actually originated from Junia Bretas, a Brazilian motivational speaker) which, translated and paraphrased, becomes: If you are depressed you are living in the past.

If you are anxious you are living in the future.

If you are at peace you are living in the present.

Depressed or anxious, it’s the unknown that we are most petrified of, so we grasp and cling to the certainty of what’s already happened or to the false security of micro-managing in our heads what comes next. Or both.

To this extent I think anxiety and depression are different expressions of the same thing – a severe discomfort with what we can’t grasp, what we can’t know. In other words, the Something Else that I keep banging on about. Indeed, some researchers in this field, increasingly aware of their fundamental similarities, argue anxiety and depression may both be facets of a broader disorder. Other research has indicated that the same neurotransmitters play a role in causing both anxiety and depression.

Some of us have depressed anxiety. Others have anxious depression. Ninety per cent of patients with anxiety have depression, while 85 per cent of patients with depression have significant anxiety, with anxiety almost always the primary condition. For me, I’m mostly anxious. Depression kicks in as an exhausted response when my anxiety goes way too far. Some literature suggests depression is a natural coping mechanism deployed in such cases to stop us from self-combusting from anxiety that’s out of control. A lot of anxious folk I’ve met agree with this take, intuitively.

The depression I experience is faded ‘Catholic school uniform’ maroon in colour, mouldy in vibe, and feels like head-fog from sleeping on an electric blanket or sitting in a 1970s office suite that oozes stale cigarette stench from the nylon carpet. It’s always felt for me like a big heavy blanket hung over my head, muffling the buzz and holding back all my dreams and drive. I hate this feeling. Anxiety, for me, is more painful by a long shot, but I prefer the sharp pain to the muffling. It seems more productive. I get ego-boosting pats on the back for the things I produce when I’m in the early stages of anxiety, even if the toll on my spirit is so dire.

And. So. I tend to draw on every bit of adrenal reserve to ricochet myself out of such muffly beigeness, invariably back into high-octane anxiety.

Novelist Matt Haig writes in his memoir about his experi­ence with suicide Reasons to Stay Alive:

Adding anxiety to depression is a bit like adding cocaine to alcohol. It presses fast-forward on the whole experience.

Aurelio Costarella is a leading Australian fashion designer who I think is a true creative. I’ve worn his dresses for various TV award functions. They are vessels of meticulous, slightly odd-ball perfection. I felt I knew the kind of guy he was just from wearing his dress. Then, years later, as I wrote this book, I found out he suffers the same afflictions as myself. I read his posts on Facebook as he went through Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) therapy, a form of electrical stimulation to the brain. I reached out to ask him how he was going … I liken my battle with depression and anxiety to being on a see-saw. If I manage to get some level of control over my depression, my anxiety bubbles to the surface.

As part of writing this book I held forums at SANE and Black Dog to help me really poke into the issues. I asked the folk who attended for their thoughts on this point: Depression and anxiety at the same time is being sucked into a hole, in the dark, but with all your nightmares chasing you, so you run around and around the bottom of the hole but never get away from anything. — Lisa Jane I have experienced both … sometimes anxiety can kick me out of depression. But then it’s like a yo-yo experience and I have trouble finding peace in the middle. — Mazarita They’re frenemies with me stuck in the middle. — Annette

It’s sort of like one side of your brain begging you not to get out of bed with chains, meanwhile the other part of you barks like a military sergeant for not getting out of bed. — Joy Anxiety and depression makes me feel as though I’m stuck in tar and can’t get out, even though my heart has so many dreams and aspirations. — Samantha 4_bit.psd

ASK YOURSELF,

‘WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?’

There’s a bit in Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now that I’ve always loved. It’s a little trick that can bring you back in from the anxious surge outwards in a palm-to-face instant. It helped me get all that ‘be in the present’ stuff that my anxiety had previously stopped me from even being able to conceptualise, let alone feel.

I went hunting for the exact passage just now so I could share it with you. You might like to try it, right now. Not in the future!

‘Ask yourself what “problem” you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment?’ He asks you to try it right now with a problem. Try it with a bit of your particular brand of anxious buzz as you read this.

Feel into the problem now; not in sixty seconds, not in two seconds. Now! Your head might jump fifteen minutes ahead. No. Now. Is the problem still there?

Nope. It’s gone, right?

As Tolle tells it, worries don’t exist in the now. Worries about the future or the past don’t exist either – they’re just narratives we create in the present. Practise asking yourself ‘what’s the problem’ often. See if you don’t start to feel the anxious cycle back away. See if those startled birds at sunset don’t begin to settle, softly, gently, at dusk. See if this gentleness is where you want to be.

48.

And what about this. When we’re thrust into it, we anxious folk can often deal with the present really rather well. It’s worth remembering this. As real, present-moment disasters occur, we invariably cope, and often better than others. The day after no sleep, I get on with things. At funerals, or when I’ve come off my bike, or the time I had to attend to my grandmother when she stopped breathing, or whenever a major work disaster plays out leaving my team in a panic, I’m a picture of calm. Dad used to call me ‘the tower of strength’ in such moments. I also don’t tend to have a lot of bog-standard fear (as opposed to anxiety). In fact, I relish real, present moment fear and actively seek it out. At the expense of sounding like a humble-bragging wanker … I hitchhike, camp solo, fling myself down mountains on bikes, break up fights in the street, scare away snakes, scoop up spiders in glass jars and dispose of them outside for neighbours, surf breaks well above my ability, etc. etc. Just don’t ask me to ‘just go to sleep if you’re tired’.

Real disasters are a cinch compared to the shit we make up in our heads.

Actually, they’re a relief.

When the future does arrive, we’re always okay. And I think my tendency to seek out risky experiences is about wanting to be reminded of this.

49.

I think when you kind of get settled with the idea that anxiety happens when we go out beyond ourselves then you really start to feel miffed about the current way we deal with anxiety. In essence most modern medicine and therapy has worked to the notion that the ‘fix’ is out there in the world somewhere. I’m here. The pills and experts are over there. And in between is a chasm of despair and lack of self-esteem that I have to wade through.

And it’s not just the Western psychopharmacological model of diagnosis and treatment that creates this heart-sinky chasm. A lot of behavioural and psychoanalytical approaches, self-help books, spiritual gurus, motivational tapes and, yes, wellness blogs can do the same. Even if inadvertently. Lou, a spiritual guide and self-help practitioner I met in London a while back, reached out recently to tell me about her ‘brutal’ seven-month breakdown that saw her move back in with her parents. She is one of the most aware and honest practitioners I’ve met and, indeed, in her email she shared that healing herself from what was ultimately diagnosed as PTSD entailed separating herself from the self-help and esoteric industries. She wrote, ‘I noticed the industry is another system that tells you something is wrong with you and is about someone else giving you a “fix” e.g. healing/happiness/peace/enlightenment as an end goal.’ You can’t believe how refreshing it was to read that.

When the pill or the guru or the ‘fresh start’ doesn’t fix the problem and the buzz (the cry of the missing Something Else) is still heard through the chemical fug and positive mantras, you go out even further to seek more answers – different pills, different experts.

Because we’re told the answer’s out there, somewhere.

Over the years, you find yourself clambering farther and farther out on a wild, fruitless goose chase. You grasp outwards, chasing the next fix. Then the next, then the next. You’re like a junkie. Or a shopper hoping the next throw cushion or handbag or novelty ice-cube tray will give you the cosy, feet-curled-up-under-you-on-a-lovely-soft-couch feeling you seek.

And all the while you’re being told there’s something wrong with you that has to be fixed. All the while you’re dependent on others’ ideas about what’s wrong with you. It spirals us out to the perilous outer limbs, leaving us to sway around in the breeze of the latest self-help fad. A long way from home.

I’m wondering, can you see that this chase takes you farther and farther away from yourself? Can you see that it also takes the whole discussion away from the Something Else that you yearn for? Because you do kind of know that the peaceful, chilled knowing you’re after is to be found much closer to the trunk of the metaphorical tree.

And can you then see that this all turns up the anxiety dial even louder?

50.

In my lifetime, I’ve grasped outwards to many things …

To sugar and coffee. A sugar or caffeine rush lunges me away from the peace I seek. It takes me up then it brings me crashing down. And so I grasp out for more. Sugar is uniquely effective at keeping us in a clutching, grasping anxious cycle. I’ve already explained how it makes us anxious in the first place. But it gets worse. We’re actually programmed to hunt it down – to grasp and grasp for it. Why? Because it’s such a marvellous and instant source of fat (which our ancestors 10,000 years ago found helpful). The stuff is also addictive and we have no ‘off full switch’ for it in our brains (as we do for all other food molecules), so we keep going back for more and more.

To alcohol. At one stage, in the lead-up to the Mid-thirties Meltdown, I’d drink a bottle of red wine a night. It would be red wine at night to wind down. Coffee and sugar to ricochet back up. Red wine at night to wind down. And so on and on.

To new cities. It’s been a pattern. I get stuck and heavy with my career or a relationship or an apartment or the circling in my head and I up and leave. I’ll make the call and be on the road within days, sometimes hours. And then I wear it as a badge of honour that nothing sticks, that I can live, yes, out of one suitcase for two years at a time, as, you might have noticed, I’ve mentioned several times already. That’s pride right there. Ugly pride. It occurs to me now that external grasping, even if it’s clearly dysfunctional, is mostly condoned as brave. Something to be ugly-proud about.

On the weekend just gone, my gorgeous friend Poh told me over dinner that I’m always fleeing. ‘You are sitting here, at the ready, about to flee to something else, away, onwards,’ she said. ‘You need to get heavy.’ Blokes have said the same thing to me in regards to my apparent ‘inapproachability’ from a dating perspective. One guy put it to me that I always seem to be on my way to somewhere else. ‘It’s too intimidating to approach someone who might dart off on you,’ he said. I truly hate that I trigger this feeling in others.

So much about anxiety is about fleeing. We are given anxiety as a handy survival mechanism that jerks us into gear in the face of danger. But we abuse it, leaning on it when we’re challenged.

To the Hare Krishnas. Oh, yes, this was one of my darker experiments. I lived for two months in an ashram in a dank forest desperately hoping the chanting and withdrawal would provide answers. I arrived in a dispiriting grey tracksuit that sagged in the bum and the knees and was told I was not allowed to think about sex (yeah, try not thinking of pink elephants). It rained torrentially. I ate mung. I turned to the skinny, orange-robbed men who’d shunned the outside world and chanted for three hours a day for a way forward. I thought I had it all wrong. I thought the skinny men who wouldn’t talk to me had it all sorted.

The sun came out one day and in the contrast this presented I saw that the cocoon I was in was starting to smell like flannelette pyjamas that needed a wash.

I jumped in my car and fled. I don’t recall saying goodbye. I went for a surf as the light faded. And then I bought some hot chips that steamed up the windows in the car.

To destructive partners. My second major relationship during my turbulent thirties, which left me unable to date again for seven years, saw me so far out on my metaphoric limb, deferring so much to him and his rather (okay, very) narcissistic ideas, that when we split my esteem was left to freefall for years. I ranted to a friend not long after our split, in earnest, ‘But he was the one in the couple who knew how life worked. What am I going to do now?’ To obsessions and compulsions. My OCD provides another grasping outlet. The counting, the checking … it keeps me doing stuff outside of myself, over and over. Ditto my bipolar behaviours. They’re an unapologetic leap way out as far as I can go, often straight to the very thing I might be afraid of, like a big decision or a confrontational phone call or heights.

To the ping of an incoming email. When I’m anxious, I toggle on social media way past my 9pm blue light curfew. I go into a zombie trance, numbly believing that the next like or find or tab will satiate me. I open up more tabs and create more options and over-research and flag everything for follow-up. Collating, tagging, sorting, accumulating.

Plus, of course, to pills, doctors, gurus, self-help books and motivational wellness blogs. All of them.

I’m looking for something or waiting for something. But it never turns up.

51.

I get Weekend Panic, although less and less these days. Weekend Panic is when you think you should be doing bigger things, farther out of town, all perfectly planned ahead. And the fact that it’s Saturday morning and a whole heap of nothing is ahead of you sends you into a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) spin. That’s another thing I grasp out to – idealised downtime. I have this idea I should be doing the stuff folk in Country Road catalogues do (in crisp striped linen on moody beaches with fashionable friends and glasses of rosé). The fun is out there. The sense of purpose (which is important to anyone who finds it hard to have a sense of self beyond their working week identity) is out there. Everyone out there is having a more relaxing, rosé-coloured time than me.

If I leave it too late to book the rustic cabin with the folksy throw-rugs, or my fashionable friends aren’t available, or if I’m too buggered to organise the excursion, or if I finally get to the catalogue-perfect weekend experience and the weather is bad and the cabin has rising damp and tubular furniture … I panic even more.

After years and years of this, fifty-two times in any given twelve months, I learned to back off with the weekend expectations. It took a long time. And writing several magazine columns on the subject to force myself to do it. If only as an ‘experiment’. Now I venture to the local beach or pool. I do hikes that are a local train or ferry ride away. I leave Saturday nights for people who don’t mind fighting crowds and stay in to watch Alfred Hitchcock movies and knit, perhaps ringing a brother or sister for a chat.

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TRY A FLÂNERIE

Another such experiment … In Paris a little while back I noticed the locals don’t walk around shops on a Sunday afternoon and buy stuff they don’t need. Hyper-­consumerism is deemed vulgar. Instead, they walk the streets merely to … wander and ponder. They call it a flânerie – a wandering walk. I once found a second-hand book with the cover ripped off that was called The Flâneur: A stroll through the paradoxes of Paris by Edmund White. To stroll in this way, White explained, is to be in real time with a city.

Parisians might drop in for a coffee or an aperitif at cafés where the chairs face outwards such that they can watch other flâneurs. They visit gardens and poke their heads into avenues and parks and galleries. Just to absorb and look and reflect. It’s a big part of the French psyche this simple observation of, and reflection upon, humanity. I love the spirit of it – sitting facing out to life. Then wandering amongst it. Then sitting back again. It’s thoroughly absorbing, which allows calm, paced, discerning thought bubbles to surface.

When there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, we settle in close to ourselves.

When I get Weekend Panic, I’ll walk to a bookshop, browse, walk home. I’ll wander around a bit on the way home. I set my aims super low. My aim is simply to look at a few things, see what happens. You know, to enjoy staying close.

52.

Let me quickly tell you about the time I ran into my mate Uge, a surfer I’ve known from around my neighbourhood for a number of years. He was sitting in the sun having a coffee at a café. I asked what he was doing because he wasn’t reading the paper or talking into a phone. He was just sitting. ‘Sez, I’m checking in with my Inside People,’ he said everyday-ishly.

I pressed him on this. He explained this entailed just sitting and asking of one’s people, ‘Are we all happy? Comfortable? Heading in good directions?’ We chatted about who these ‘people’ were.

‘Do you mean that side of ourselves we go home to after a bewildering day, or a loud night? The self we can see in our eyes looking in the mirror as we brush our teeth; the self that’s always there, silent and knowing?’ I asked.

‘I guess so,’ he said.

Now for context, Uge used to have an office job. But seventeen years ago he started getting up at dawn to sit and watch people on Bondi Beach and take digital pictures of them surfing, running, meditating. He’d post them on this new contraption called a blog, which fellow desk slaves could access when they got to their cubicles in the morning. The message spread and soon enough he was able to toss in the day job and turned his site into a full-time gig. He now travels the world to surf and capture the joy of the sun coming up over beaches. Nice life if you can create it for yourself.

When I ask what anxious people get wrong, he’s emphatic. ‘They don’t give themselves time with their Inside People!’

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HOW TO CHECK IN WITH

YOUR INSIDE PEOPLE

I defer to Uge’s advice wholeheartedly on this.

Don’t overcomplicate things. Simply make the time to check in. Every day. Sunrise is his time. He honours it daily. Morning is my time, too. I carve out about twenty minutes to meditate. Or just hang out. Maybe on a bench in my head. Or I use a void in my day – while driving, while waiting at a bus stop – that I’d normally use to return calls.

It’s pretty much meditation spelled out fresh. In fact, it reminds me of Sky’s advice to just meditate. It’s a powerful point. Just create the space with your Inside People and the rest will unfurl as it needs to.

Uge tells me that we then feel where our inside peeps are at. Try saying to yourself, as he does, ‘Are we good? Are we comfortable? Is this where we should be? Is it making sense?’ ‘Don’t think or plan in this space, just check in,’ he says.

Then let stuff happen. It just does, ‘without trying’, he tells me. In his case, a thriving business happened to him. Literally. It did for me, too, as I explained earlier.

Chatting to Uge I realised it’s also important to listen to what your peeps tell you when you ask them how they are. It will probably be heard with a feeling, perhaps an expansiveness, a release. It’s funny, for me, the answer that I hear is invariably, ‘Better than we thought, actually.’ Inside peeps are like that. When you check in on them.

53.

What would it mean to stop? On an anxiety forum somewhere on the interweb a writer shares that his anxiety sees him ‘running on custard’, a surface that is almost solid ground underneath him, but only if he keeps running.

‘I must keep going … if I stop, the custard softens and I drown in custard … And the more people I talk to, the more I realise this feeling of exhaustion – of not being able to rest, of not getting anywhere – is common. And I wondered what it would mean to stop.’